Drawings
Light sabres William (4 years 6 months) is fascinated by Star Wars and often plays out various scenes with his friend. He has drawn a light sabre for each of his favourite characters from the Star Wars film. The colours are important; for example, red is for ‘Darth Maul’. His teacher explained, "William draws hundreds of these pictures at the moment – either of light sabres or bows and arrows from the Lord of the Rings – they seem to be linked to his fascination with counting or amounts and he will count all sorts of objects again and again".
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| “Look! No chicken! You want mushroom?” Buying, preparing, ordering and eating food together have significant roles in Shereen’s family. Drawing on her personal and social knowledge of cafés, Shereen (AGE) approached her friends for orders, making wavy, writing-like lines and a drawing of a fish and a mushroom in response. After a while she returned to ask her teacher Emma, “what you want: rice, chocolate, cake, chicken?” Emma said she didn’t want chicken and Shereen wrote a mark for “chicken” and drew a cross by it, clarifying,“It says “x” - no chicken.” Later Emma said she would have chicken, but pointing to the “x” she had written, Shereen said, “Look! No chicken! You want mushroom?” Then pointing to her drawing of a mushroom explained, “Look. A tick, that mean we got some.” Shereen used a range marks and signs to communicate her mathematical thinking about some and and none, including drawings of a fish and mushroom.
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Paper calculators This play began when Martin was playing with a real calculator: he seemed to be using it as a digital game, pressing the buttons and commenting excitedly “Fighting games! Video games!” It was Martin who first decided to use a small notebook to make ‘paper calculators’, explaining as he tore off a sheet, “This is a different calculator with computer games on”. Alfie (4 years, 3 months) watched Mason use pages from a notebook to make ‘calculators’ and decided to join in. Having drawn shapes on his page, Alfie ripped it off the pad and then made more symbols, saying,‘"6, 7, 8, 9, I’ve done a number 10’", followed by a third sheet, announcing "9, 10, 11, 12." In twenty minutes, Alfie made a total of seven paper ‘calculators’. The enclosed shapes suggest the buttons on a calculator, and the reversed ‘7’ signs suggest numerals.
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| Stanley’s shoes Nine children were playing in the home corner, and in the course of their play had removed their shoes in order to dress up. At tidy-up-time, Kylie asked, ”How many shoes will we need to find?" suggesting they might find a way of finding out how many they needed to locate. Hannah (5 years, 5 months) decided to fetch some paper, and drew nine children. She counted all their legs and then wrote ‘18’ at the foot of the paper. Stanley (5 years, 6 months) drew a horseshoe shape to represent each pair of legs and feet. He then counted in twos, writing the accumulating twos beneath the ‘horseshoes’. He had omitted to count the ‘feet’ of one horseshoe. At first totalling them to ‘16’: (the children had been learning about counting in twos the previous week). When their teacher brought the children together, to discuss their various methods, Stanley quickly realised what he had done, and counted again – this time counting them all to arrive at his total of ‘18’.
Representing quantities that are not counted; Counting continuously
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One is a snail The delightful picture story book, One is a Snail, Ten is a Crab (Pulley Sayre and Sayre, 2004) uses pictures of snails, crabs, dogs and spiders – each with different numbers of feet - to support counting to 100. After sharing the book with the children, their teacher Karen suggested that they choose their own number and work out which combination of creatures’ legs would total that number. Shimae (4 years, 6 months) had decided to "find out what is 100’. She wrote the number ‘100’ and as she progressed, counted the legs she’d drawn. After a while she said, "This is hard now, all this counting. Can you help me?" So as Shimae drew, an adult counted with her, Shimae noting the total she counted each time. When she’d reached counting to ‘one hundred’ she wrote: "6 spidr 3 insec 1 pursn 1 well (whale) 1 pig." Other children counted in multiples, counted on, counted back, estimated, used repeated addition, subtraction and multiplication.
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 | “My Dad’s got 5 eyes!” Shakkai and his friend were drawing pictures of their dads. Shakkai (4 years, 10 months) drew four eyes on his dad’s face, and the boys laughed uproariously at their drawings. Shakkai said, “I’m going to add another eye. Look! He has five now!”
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