Abstract:

Today, more than ever, school is expected to provide students with a solid mathematical knowledge and experience that will enable them, throughout their education, to integrate and mobilize them in diverse contexts, as well as in their future lives at a personal, professional, or social level. Being aware of this situation, we think that these skills in students should be developed in the early years, and in this sense it is up to the teacher to provide children with challenging and enriching experiences so that they feel motivated to study mathematics. These learning situations involve the use of different methodologies based on non-routine tasks of a diversified nature, contextualized in the students’ daily lives and that help them to build new mathematical knowledge, developed logical-mathematical reasoning, problem solving, as well as creativity and critical thinking. In this way, students will acquire a taste for mathematics and will certainly be able to appreciate this science, allowing them to develop a proper vision and positive outlook on its role and use in the current world.

In this article we present a proposal of tasks that were implemented with a group of Pre-school children, in the context of Supervised Teaching Practice, related to the area of mathematics, in interdisciplinarity with the other areas of knowledge, taking into account the learning to be promoted according to the Curriculum Guidelines for Pre-school Education. These tasks allow us to work mathematics in a concrete context, close to the students’ daily lives, such as commemorative days of various annual events, based on means and didactics resources familiar to children, as well as others specifically built for this purpose, as playful and dynamic as possible. This way of promoting the learning of concepts, appealing, whenever possible, to concrete realities of everyday life will allow students to more easily understand and accept them, thus promoting learning with an understanding of these contents. We believe that these task proposals can also be used as inspiration for the adaptation or creation of other possibilities of use not only in the Portuguese context, but also in other foreign contexts.

Keywords:

Mathematics, mathematical tasks, Pre-school Education.