Kindergarten Children and Early Learning of Number: Embodied and Material Encounters Within the Classroom

Abstract

In this article, we draw on assemblage theory to investigate how children aged 5 engage with different material surfaces to explore ordinal and relational aspects of number. The children participate in an activity in which they first interact with a strip on the floor, then with a multi-touch iPad application, to work with numbers in expressive ways. Focus is on the physicality and materiality of the activity and the provisional ways that children, surfaces, and number come together. While the notion of assemblage helps us see how movement animates the mathematical activity, we enrich our understanding of the entanglement of children, matter, and number as sustained by coordinated movements, from which numbers emerge as relations.