Number stories

True personal stories are used to introduce some of the research into pre-school children’s development of number knowledge and skills. A range of conversations and stimulating environments illustrate how parents, grandparents, peers, and early childhood professionals support the mastery of new number words and concepts as well as mathematical actions, in everyday contexts and play situations. The stories discuss the learning of real children developing knowledge and skills in the pre-school years. They tell about early quantity identification along with some young children’s growth of interest in and skills with cardinal and ordinal number and counting; learning about more and less, then very simple addition and subtraction; early recognition and naming of multiplication “arrays”; written numeral identification; and one child’s earliest abstract understanding of the idea of infinity. For each of these topics, some research on pre-school learning is outlined. The growth of children’s self-concepts as they handle mathematics and the situatedness of learning in varied and everyday, informal learning contexts are supplementary themes of this chapter.