Abstract:

This paper draws on a research project, which is conducted at the Center of Individual Development and Adaptive Education of Children at Risk (IDeA) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
From a sociocultural perspective, the analysis of mathematics education in early childhood requires also to consider the familial context, which has a significant influence on the children’s development in the early childhood. For this reason we focus on family situations, which deals with mathematical problems as an everyday affair.
For this study, 12 children about 4 years old are chosen from a larger sample that belongs to the IDeA-research project “early Steps in Mathematics Learning. (erStMaL). The criteria are the ethnic background (German or Turkish), duration of the formal education of the parents and sibling situations within in the familIes. The project is planned as an empirical longitudinal study for 5 years.
In the presentation social-constructivist approaches of learning-as-participation will be applied. We primarily present a mathematical play situation of an immigrant Turkish family. The analytical focus is on the impact of: (1) cultural differences while playing, (2) the participation of sibling and (3) "code switching" during the play.

Keywords:

Early childhood, mathematics, family, code-switching.