Using picture books to support mathematical development
Published on: 04 December 2024
Catherine Gripton, Helen J. Williams and Sue Gifford, from the Early Childhood Maths Group, explain how reading picture books can improve children's maths skills.
L-R - Sue Gifford, Catherine Gripton and Helen J. Williams
At BookTrust our research shows that if children are read with, there’s a beneficial effect for them across the curriculum. That’s why we combine maths games with books in our award-winning programme Letterbox Club.
Picture books open up a wealth of possible worlds to children, many of which are rich in mathematics. Research has shown that just reading such books can help children learn mathematics, but exploring the mathematical ideas with discussion and activities can help even more according to a review of research in this area. Books supply meaningful contexts that make sense to the child, with engaging characters and contexts. Sharing picture books can also help build positive relationships with mathematics, for both adults and children.
Young children are naturally mathematical problem solvers and inquirers: with the right experiences, all children can develop flexible thinking and positive attitudes to mathematics. These children (above) are enjoying a picnic on the moon, inspired by Whatever Next by Jill Murphy.They are tackling the problem of sharing various food items (wearing colander space helmets).
Choosing and using picture books to support mathematical learning
It is important not to ruin a good story by stopping to ask mathematical questions that are irrelevant to the narrative, such as counting the characters’ legs. Instead, the mathematics should arise authentically from the picture book context and lead to greater appreciation of the book as well as the mathematical ideas involved. Recent research has shown that children’s number knowledge improved more when the children were read books with rich narratives involving counting rather than simpler books with pictures of items to count (Carrazza et al., 2024). A good example is Abigail by Catherine Rayner, where the animals are learning to count, but finding it a little tricky.
It is important to identify the mathematical possibilities in a book and then to plan discussions and activities.
The Early Childhood Mathematics Group have lists of children’s books which readily support a range of mathematical learning. For instance, Ten in the Bed by David Ellwand shows the bears in the bed and those fallen out, prompting children to predict how many will be in and out of bed on the next page. The Doorbell Rang by Pat Hutchins is about the problem of sharing cookies between ever-increasing numbers of children, inviting practical investigation. Adults might ask, ‘How can we find out how many cookies were there at the start?’ The delightfully illustrated classic, Anno’s Counting Book, by Mitsumasa Anno, challenges children to spot different representations of numbers to 12. One is a Snail, Ten is a Crab, by April Pully Sayre, Jeff Sayre and Randy Cecil, is about combinations of creatures making a specific number of feet.
This five-year-old drew her own collection of creatures, including a lobster, a bee and a tree, writing the numbers of ‘feet’ she could see, then adding them all up.
Picture books do not just encourage learning about number. Stories about journeys can prompt children to help characters find their way, using spatial language such as ‘up’,‘around’ and ‘through’ (eg The Secret Path by Nick Butterworth). Older children might create maps to explore direction and position (eg Henry’s Map by David Elliot). Some books encourage children to visualise, for instance, how to put shapes together to make different animals (Tangram Cat by Maranke Rinck and Martijn van der Linden) or to rearrange patchwork pieces to make a longer quilt with a different pattern (Grandpa’s Quilt by Betsy Franco and Linda Bild).
A few books explore the important idea of repeating patterns, eg Beep, Beep, Vroom, Vroom by Stuart J. Murphy and Chris L. Demarest. The quirky Press Here by Hervé Tullet has mistakes for children to spot, which is an activity they really enjoy.
Many picture books are about mathematical situations, which children can re-enact or extend in playful ways.
For example, using cuddly toy animals and a range of packaging boxes, children can investigate how many animals are inside or outside the house in A Squash and a Squeeze by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler. Young children enjoy making models of settings, with houses and vehicles for characters, using paper, toys, blocks and packaging. Adults can join in the play, and ask questions such as, ‘Which place is the furthest away?’Adults and children can also invent simple maths games using picture book characters, counting steps as Mr Wolf, being the first to collect cards with all the shopping list items needed or rolling a die/spinner to move the Gruffalo and mouse along a number track to get the Gruffalo back to the cave first.
In some picture books, the mathematics is less immediately obvious, so an adult might ask, ‘What would happen if…’, posing a scenario involving the familiar characters and setting. For instance, in Socks by Elizabeth Lindsay and Nick Sharratt, children might explore different sized socks for different people or make repeating patterns for stripey socks. In Little Croc’s Purse by Lizzie Finlay, children might help Little Croc work out how many glasses of lemonade he could buy or how to mix ‘lemonade’ with different amounts of water and colouring. Adults might pose further challenges, like, ‘How much money might be in the piggy bank if there are two coins but we don’t know what coins they are?’ and ‘What would happen if there were seven (or ten or twenty) animals?’
Story contexts can provide particularly engaging environments for setting mathematical problems for children to solve, including in maths games. The narratives in story books can bring the mathematics alive for children and are safer and more flexible than ‘real world’ problems. Fictional situations allow children to reason about the merits of different character choices and make mistakes in the comfort of an imaginary world, putting them in control of the mathematics.
Identifying the mathematics in a picture book, asking mathematical questions, providing resources for representational play, and setting story- and context-based problems to solve can support children to develop deep understanding and enjoyment of mathematics.
References
Carrazza, C., & Levine, S.C. (2024). Less is not always more: Rich and meaningful counting books lead to greater gains in number understanding than sparse counting books. Developmental Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001826
van den Heuvel-Panhuizen, M., Elia, I., & Robitzsch, A. (2016). Effects of reading picture books on kindergartners’ mathematics performance. Educational Psychology, 36(2), 323-346. https://doi.org/10.1080/01443410.2014.963029
Topics: Letterbox Club, Early learning, Features, Maths
