Primary School Math

Learning Mathematics in the Primary Grades

For their first five years, children build informal and intuitive understandings about numbers, shapes, and sizes. To do this, they investigate quantities, shapes and locations by playing with the things in their environment. Parents, older siblings and other adults enrich young children’s experiences by teaching them how to count, by playing counting games and by showing them how to flip, slide or turn puzzle pieces to get them to fit. When the environment is organized to foster putting like things together, such as putting away the blocks in one place and the vehicles in another, children learn to compare and classify—two important aspects of mathematical thinking. Young children develop a disposition for mathematics through their early years of interacting with the people and things in their environment. When children begin kindergarten, they rely on the informal, intuitive mathematical understandings developed in the first five years of their lives to solve story problems involving joining, separating, grouping, and partitioning. The first problems they meet are story problems that have familiar contexts. The actions in the problems help primary grade students act out or model the situations. They capture the quantities with real objects or counters and then use their counting skills to answer the questions in the problems. Students should solve problems with numbers as well as problems using two- and three-dimensional shapes. They should be encouraged to talk about what they notice during their problem solving experiences. As students in the primary grades deepen their math knowledge and learn more about conventional mathematical representations and vocabulary, they become more flexible in the ways they work with numbers and shapes. They are more able to apply their knowledge and skills to solve a wider variety of problems with unfamiliar as well as familiar contexts.