Graphic representations in the form of pictures by children in pre-school education

Abstract

The aim of the work is to study the evolution of 5-years-old children graphic representations. Starting from the exploration of the daily routine, the children were encouraged to make graphic representations, such as attendance tables and responsibilities, which were daily reconstructed and filled by them. From their analyzes, the construction of mathematical knowledge was promoted.
This qualitative research was carried out between January and June 2018, with 20 children from a Porto school. Data were collected through participant observation, field notes and photographic records.
In this study the children's action was privileged: the registers were exclusively constructed by them, their evolution was determined by what they were required in terms of reading and interpretation and in which their decision capacity on solutions was total. The action of the adult was in the sense of provoking discussion among children, in order to potentiate the appearance of proposals of solution for each problem; never solving the asked question, or defining ways to forward, nor making interventions in the registers.
The results show that children create increasingly complex representations, integrate conventional symbols that support mathematical language, are able to establish and represent relationships between sets and discover strategies for presenting these relationships.