“I just won against myself!”: Fostering early numeracy through boardgame play and redesign

Abstract
Children can develop a wide variety of mathematical concepts as well as positive relationships with mathematics through playing and redesigning board games. In this article, we introduce the process of integrating board game play and redesign into early mathematics classrooms. Presenting the cases from Kindergarten and Grade 3 and 4 classrooms in a linguistically and culturally-diverse school, we highlight learning opportunities that fostered early numeracy. We discuss how children used and demonstrated their understanding of integrated numeracy including subitizing, understanding ordinality and cardinality of number, area-model of multiplication, spatial reasoning and problem-posing and problem-solving. Learning that children engaged in was holistic: the project not only fostered children’s early numeracy, but also helped them develop a positive relationship with mathematics and social rules to play games together, and see themselves as designers, problem-solvers, and creative people.
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Citation
Jaques, S., Kim, B., Shyleyko-Kostas, A., & Takeuchi, M. A. (2019). “I just won against myself!”: Fostering early numeracy through boardgame play and redesign. "Early Childhood Education", 46(1) 2019, 22-29.