Week 9

Importance of Mathematics and Storytelling:

Week 9

Reading Response

Numeracy: Mathematical Process

Literacy: Young children as storytellers

I chose both readings as I felt they both expressed the importance of mathematics and the use of storytelling in a young child’s early learning of numeracy and literacy. Both readings supported their statements through findings and what interested me was that they had incorporated the children’s work and what they had created through the storytelling activity. It was of interest to me that they both stated that mathematics and story telling is a core subject that should be of a main focus in early years learning. Both readings stress the important aspect that mathematics and storytelling should be integrated into symbolic play and through interesting structured hands on activities. And at the end of the day to provide a rich early learning of numeracy and literacy it stressed that mathematics should not be isolated as it generally can be due to many automatically feel that it will be boring. Storytelling can be incorporated in a variety of ways; self-recorded stories, adult-recorded stories and or as simple as symbolic play through the children.

From the findings from the two readings it gave me great knowledge based around how important mathematics and storytelling can be on a young child’s numeracy and literacy early learning. Not all of the knowledge was new to me however it has reaffirmed the importance of mathematics and storytelling. It has provided me with strategies and a variety of different ways in which I can include the elements into learning and to still create a fun and interesting rich environment for the young children. As I was aware and I do believe that these elements are of significant importance in a young child’s learning the findings in the readings therefore supported the knowledge that I already had based around the two topics. However as an educator I can now express the importance of mathematics and the different ways in which we can include storytelling into our daily education structure.

References:

Hall, N. (1998). Young children as storytellers. In R. Campbell (Eds.), Facilitating preschool literacy (pp. 84-99). Newark, Delaware: International Reading Association.

Sarama, J. & Clements, D. (2009). Mathematical processes. Early childhood mathematics education research: Learning trajectories for young children (pp. 335-346). New York: Routledge.