Learning & Development: Maths - The size of it

The eyes of the boy in front of me lit up as he spoke the words of his story. 'I was a baby and I was getting so little. I go in this tiny little bed. Now I was bigger. Now I'm going to be really bigger. One day.' I could almost see his mind whirling through images of himself as a baby and marvelling at how much he had grown.

This was Andre's story, scribed during a Helicopter Stories session by MakeBelieve Arts. He was four years (and three days) old. 'It was his birthday at the weekend,' his teacher told me. 'As a treat, his mum showed him all his baby photos.' I smiled. The joy in his eyes made even more sense and I couldn't help thinking of the maths potential in what he was saying.

I had just finished working with Linda Pound on the second edition of Teaching Mathematics Creatively (Routledge, May 2015) and I had been worrying about how many children admit that they don't like maths from an early age. I wanted to share with them my enjoyment of bringing maths to life creatively, and yet more and more I saw instances where for many children this was a long way off. And now here was Andre, a four-year-old example of how maths can be exciting, and it had all poured out of him in a storytelling session. If we could capture this exhilaration, and keep it bottled, ready to release in maths lessons across the country, now that would be something to celebrate.

For the past two years, MakeBelieve Arts has received funding from the SHINE trust to pilot a programme supporting children struggling in Year 3, 4 and 5, and to give them the opportunity to engage with maths through story.

One of the biggest obstacles faced by the children we worked with was a preconceived idea that maths was boring, or that they were no good at it, or that it really wasn't for them. Having spoken to teachers and to the children themselves, it became clear that many of the groups we were working with had given up on maths from a very early age, perhaps the same, or maybe one year older than, the age that Andre had just reached.

How sad that in just four years a child could go from wonderment at the mysteries of the world to feeling like they would never be able to understand them, and they might as well not bother trying.

One eight-year-old boy that we interviewed gave a very poetic and frighteningly visual response to how maths made him feel. 'Let's put it this way: I'm in the middle of the road and there is a car speeding towards me - that car is maths,' he explained. Other children said they loved being active and maths was just too much sitting down. And a lot of them talked about always getting it wrong.

When the perception of maths is that you either get it right or you get it wrong, and you find yourself on the 'getting it wrong' side far too many times, it is not surprising that you begin to believe you are no good at it. If the adults in your life tell you that they were always rubbish at maths, then it is hard for anyone to convince you that it might be fun, that it might actually be connected to what is happening to you.

As Keith Devlin (2000) notes, 'Mathematics is not about number, it is about life. It is about the world in which we live. It is about ideas. And, far from being dull and sterile, as it is so often portrayed, it is full of creativity.'

ALL AROUND US

Maths is all around us, as four-year-old Andre reminds us. What better time is there to understand the mathematical language of size than when you have just had a birthday and you realise, maybe for the first time, that you were much smaller once? As I sat next to Andre, my mind raced through all the possibilities of how we could bring the maths in his story to life.

The fascination with growing older is rich with maths possibilities. Inviting children to bring in their old baby clothes to discover how many times these outfits go into their now larger bodies involves counting and measuring and the language of size. Place lines on the wall to show how tall the children are now and, if their parents know or you can estimate from their baby clothes, how tall they were when they were born, and all sorts of measuring activities can arise. Draw around the child on lining paper and you have a cut-out of their body, which could be used as a form of measurement, or an item to measure.

Whenever MakeBelieve Arts is doing measurement with a group of children we introduce a rhyme. For example, if we were measuring with shoes we would say, 'One shoe, two shoes and no gaps, three shoes and no gaps.' By inviting the whole group to join in with this chant we remind them that when we measure we don't leave a gap.

Drawing future height marks or making adult cut-outs based on average male or female statistics gives children an idea of how tall they might grow. The tallest person in the world is 8ft 11in (2.72m) - how many times would their baby height, or their own height, go into a silhouette of that?

Maybe the children could be asked to measure the adults in their lives and mark out their heights. Or parents could be asked to lie on the floor and let their child draw around them as they arrive at the start of the day. Once you have all these different types of height information, encourage the children to start asking questions. This is problem finding.

How tall a shelter should we make for the tallest person in the world? How many blocks do we need to build a bed for a baby? If every child in the nursery has a baby-sized cut-out, how far would they stretch across the playground?

At the extreme end of the scale we have giants, those that are taller than 8ft (2.44m), whose heads reach up to the sky and whose arms could wrap around the nursery and hug all of the children and all of the adults in one go. Introduce giants to a setting and the maths potential is enormous. Marking out different giant lengths in the playground in chalk, or in the classroom in masking tape, offers the potential to explore size in a range of exciting ways. Can you create a giant cut-out and see how many children fit inside it?

And what about someone who is tiny? Preiser produces models of people doing various activities at a scale of 1:87. These are perfect for creating small worlds, and long lines for measuring. How many Preiser people laid in a row would equal the height of the baby cut-out?

SHAPES AND SIZES

As the joy of finding maths problems pours out of me, I wonder what it is that turns so many children off maths before they even have the chance to discover the fun in problem finding, and in working on ways to solve the questions they ask.

At MakeBelieve Arts, we work with a story called The Maths Curse to engage children in finding their own maths problems from a range of stimuli. From some of the questions that have been asked, an amazing array of maths solutions have been uncovered.

One question was: 'If we stood at one end of the hall and threw each of the superheroes, which one would travel the furthest?' This was from a Year 2 child who was working in a group to find interesting maths questions based around a pack of superhero toys. His teacher thought he was being rude. I thought it was genius.

Imagine if you stood with a range of toys of different sizes and different shapes and made from different material, and you stood on a line, and one by one you threw them and put a mark where they landed, what would you learn? Would the heaviest toys fall nearer or further away? Is it easier to throw the smaller toys? Do different children throwing the same toys get different results? Which toys are consistently thrown the furthest?

Once the results are in, think of the graph possibilities, or the averages, or measurements, or the conversations, or the mathematical language that would excite and incite wonder in the children to work out things beyond the levels expected for their age.

And maybe the child was being facetious, but the spark in his eyes as he posed his question showed a glimmer of possibility, that here was something worth investigating.

This was the same excitement as Andre showed when recounting his story and, without knowing it, trying to make sense of the world with maths.

Perhaps we should reflect more often on the quote from Marcus du Sautoy, professor of mathematics at University of Oxford: 'Mathematics has beauty and romance. It's not a boring place to be, the mathematical world. It's an extraordinary place; it's worth spending time there.'

Trisha Lee is founder and artistic director of MakeBelieve Arts

MORE INFORMATION

MakeBelieve Arts, www.makebelievearts.co.uk

MakeBelieve Arts maths programme, www.makebelievearts.co.uk/mathematics

Preiser figures - see for example, www.osbornsmodels.com/preiser-figures-489-c.asp

The Math Gene: how mathematical thinking evolved and why numbers are like gossip by Keith Devlin (2000), Basic Books.