Irons (1999) asserts that young children will start to learn mathematics when they begin to interact with the world around them. They are also become aware of the attributes of everything that their eyes could see, their hands could touch, their ears to could, their nose could smell and their tongue could taste.
Attributes are features or characteristics of a certain object which young children could notice through the colour, mass, shape or even sizes as claims by Irons (1999). The process of identifying and describing attributes is concerned with the likenesses and differences between objects or pictures (Irons, 1999). The ability to recognize likenesses and differences is important in the development of children's beginning mathematics (Irons, 1999). The designed activities should be able to help young children to distinguish details and be more attentive. There are namely 5 beginning processes:
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Matching
Matching activities focus on the ‘sameness’ of attributes (Irons,1999). Children will select the objects or pictures that have the same attributes and group them together. They will then describe why the objects or pictures match using the language associated with the attribute that they have selected. For example they could match the objects according to the colour, shapes, functions or even the size of the objects or pictures.
The picture shows several toy vehicles with varities of colours were laid on the table. Children were asked to match them according to their attributes. They have matched those toy vehicles into their types. Similiarly, young children could match those toys into other attributes such as to match them according to colour or even match them to according to the shape of the toy vehicles as long as there are ‘sameness’ among them.
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Sorting
Irons (1999) claims that sorting involves large number of objects and the process of sorting involves grouping objects or pictures according to more attributes. Children are the one who should choose the attributes to work with (Irons, 1999).
In the picture, children use the sorting board to sort the shape according to the colour and type of the shapes.
The process of sorting involves the three 'Ds' - Decide, Do and Describe. The aim is to have children decide which attributes to sort by, do the sorting and describe the sorting after it has been completed (Irons,1999).
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Comparing
Comparing is based on relations between amounts of an attribute that two objects possess. Children are required to determine which of two objects possesses more or less of the attribute (Irons, 1999).
Children could see the difference between these two objects in term of their size. The one on the right is bigger than the one on the left. According to Irons (1999), children’s vocabulary is greatly developed during the process of comparing due to the uses of phrases such as ‘more big’ because it makes sense to them. Teacher should model the correct usage of words that associate with comparisons of objects such as the ‘er’. For example, the object on the left is big but the object on the right is bigger.
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Ordering
The process of ordering according to Irons (1999) is the involvement of arranging objects according to the relations between them based on the increasing or decreasing amounts. Either from big to small vice versa.
Based on the picture above we could see that young children are able to arrange the order of the block in an increasing order based on the size from smallest to the biggest.
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Patterning
Patterns are formed by the repetition of objects or pictures and are recognisable and predictable in order of any arrangement (Irons, 1999). There are three type of patterns; repeating patterns, growing patterns and relationship patterns. Repeating patterns are usually used for young children because it involves only one element that is being repeated.
Repeating Pattern
Growing Pattern
Relationship Pattern
| Number of boxes | Number of crayons |
| 1 | 8 |
| 2 | 16 |
| 3 | 24 |
| 4 | 32 |
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