Abstract:

This work intends to encourage the practice of new and motivational approaches to learning mathematical contents. A negative connotation is commonly attributed to this area of knowledge, often defined as difficult, without connection to reality and excessively based on exercises, calculations through techniques and algorithms, whose common understanding is within reach of only a few. Therefore, aware that mathematics should be a science for all and in order to perform a paradigm shift, this paper deals with the use of stories written by children as a promising resource in learning mathematics.
Learning mathematics, based on children's stories, offers students the opportunity to understand what they are studying by familiarising them with the mathematical language contained in stories, enabling cognitive relationships to be established between the mother tongue language, real-life concepts and the formal language of mathematics. Furthermore, it fosters the development of skills in the field of writing, critical thinking, mathematical vocabulary and problem solving.
In this context, in addition to reading children's narratives, students should be involved in the production of stories that have mathematics as their theme, exploring their imagination and creativity. Writing is a means that allows students to improve knowledge and reflect on their understanding of mathematics, helping them to identify links and clarify concepts.
Therefore, a study was carried out with 13 pupils of the 1st grade, in order to answer the following research questions: How do these students write a problem? What characters do they use? What vocabulary do they use? How creative are they? A quantitative methodology was used to study the participants' writing of problem statements for which only one operation was given in one task which we called The Inventor student task. Those answers were subjected to content analysis.
This study concluded that the participants demonstrated clear notions of the structure of a problem, creating well-organised statements, with a question properly formulated and contextualized with the data provided. One might argue that those students used simple, yet correctly appropriate vocabulary, even exceeding expectations for this age group.

Keywords:

Interdisciplinary, mathematics, written communication, writing to learn.