Picture Books as an Impetus for Kindergartners' Mathematical Thinking

Although there is evidence that the use of picture books affects young children's achievement scores in mathematics, little is known about the cognitive engagement and, in particular, the mathematical thinking that is evoked when young children are read a picture book. The focus of the case study reported in this article is on the cognitive engagement that is facilitated by the picture books themselves and not on how this engagement is prompted by a reader. The book under investigation, Vijfde zijn Being Fifth], is a picture book of high literary quality that was not written for the purpose of teaching mathematics. The story is about a doctor's waiting room and touches on backwards counting and spatial orientation only tacitly as part of the narrative. Four 5 year olds were each read the book by one of the authors without any questioning or probing. The reading sessions took place in school, outside the classroom. A detailed coding framework was developed for analyzing the children's utterances that provided an in-depth picture of the children's spontaneous cognitive engagement. Surprisingly, almost half the utterances were mathematics-related. The findings of the study support the idea that reading children picture books without explicit instruction or prompting has large potential for mathematically engaging children.