All young children are emergent learners, at home, in pre-school, nursery school, kindergarten and in school.                                               

      The word emergent expresses that “the child’s understanding is gradually developing, and is being produced through interactions within a culture”, their understandings and knowledge expanding through activity" (Gillen, 2003, p. 19).

     Emergent learning has been especially evident in emergent writing, interest triggered considerably by Marie Clay's work (1975) and developed by researchers and teachers during the 1980s (e.g., Bissex, 1982; Ferriero & Teberosky, 1979;  Goodman & Goodman, 1992; Newman, 1984); Smith, 1982; Teale & Sulzby, 1992) and others. This led to interest in what was known as whole language (e.g., Cambourne, 1988; Goodman, 1994).

    More recently, Gunter Kress, (1997) highlighted the multimodal underpinnings of young children's early writing, followed by Pahl (1999) and others. Having seen the power of children's emergent writing in our own classrooms, it was from this strong foundation that we began to explore Children's Mathematical Graphics.

      Young learners explore ideas, theorising about aspects of their worlds and making sense of their experiences. It is difficult for children to do this if they are always told what to do and how to do it, and open situations including pretend play can provide rich contexts for children's ' dynamic and complex' understandings to emerge (see Wood & Hedges, 2016). It is vital that adults respect and value children's emergent understandings. 

References

Clay, M. (1975). What did  I write? Beginning writing behaviour.Heinemann.

Bissex, G. (1982). GNYS AT WRK. Child learns to write and read. Harvard.

Cambourne, B. (1988). The whole story: Natural learning and the acquisition of literacy in the classroom. Ashton Scholastic.

Ferriero, E., & Teberosky, A. (1979). Literacy before schooling. Heinemann.

Gillen, (2003). The Language of Children. Routledge.  

Goodman, Y., & Goodman, K. (1992). Vygotsky in a whole-language perspective. In L. Moll

(Ed.), Vygotsky and education: Instructional implications and applications of sociohis-

torical psychology (pp. 223–250). Cambridge University Press.

Goodman, K. (1994). What's whole in whole language? Scholastic.

Kress, G. (1997). Before writing: Rethinking the paths to literacy. Routledge.

Lancaster, L. (2003). Moving into literacy: How it all begins. In N. Hall, J. Larson, & J. Marsh (Eds.),

Handbook of early childhood literacy (pp. 145-153). Sage.

Newman, J. (1984). The craft of children's writing. Scholastic.

Pahl, K. (1999). Transformations: Children’s meaning making in a nursery. Trentham.

Smith, F. (1982). Writing and the writer. Heinemann.

Teale, W. H., & Sulzby, E. (Eds.). (1992). Emergent literacy: Writing and reading. Ablex.

Tolchinsky, L. (2003). The cradle of cultured what children know about writing and numbers before being taught. Lawrence Erlbaum.

Wood, E.,  & Hedges H (2016). Curriculum in Early Childhood Education: asking critical questions about content, coherence and control. The Curriculum Journal 27(3): 387–405.