Making Tens with Four Hands: Touchscreen-Based Classroom Activity for Early Number Learning

Abstract

As schools increasingly embrace embodied learning, there is a growing need to incorporate classroom teaching and learning activities that recognize the body’s role as both an individual and collective resource for cognition and instruction. In response, we present a design for a classroom teaching sequence focused on early number learning, featuring pedagogical activities supported by TouchCounts (TC) and engaged by pairs of children using their four hands. These activities showcase the potential of embodied learning for children to explore concepts such as odd and even numbers, as well as the composition and decomposition of numbers up to and including ten. We elaborate on the functionalities of TC, outline the teaching sequence, and offer episodes of our classroom observations. Specifically, we present three lesson snapshots aimed at first-graders (aged 6 to 7) using a class set of TC, student learning outcomes, and notable observations as students interact with the touchscreen environment. For example, we note that the student pairs used their hands to reinforce, extend, and redirect mathematical ideas; besides, they developed a collective discourse through (gestural) subitizing the number of fingers that they (and their partner) put up (and folded down). This snapshot explicates the collective learning experiences in classroom settings involving pair-work activities and informs existing work on embodied (mathematical) cognition beyond how students learn with their bodies individually.