numbers | Samantha's Journey to Teaching!

My first Maths and Science input of semester 2 with Tara made me challenge my way of thinking or as I thought the normal way of thinking.

When talking in social situations or even just reading simple stories it is apparent that mathematical terminology is at the forefront of them. In this lecture, Tara read us a story and asked us to think of the words she said and to write down the mathematical terms in a list on our page. Originally I only counted 10-15 words of this type but after it was explained I had the realisation that mathematical terminology is not only words associated with number, but size, positioning etc. Realising this made me feel the need to look closer at other children’s stories and rhymes.

I decided to look at This nursery rhyme in particular because numbers are prominent here and frankly to begin with I didnt think there would be many more terms other than the numbers 1-10.

I was wrong…

In this early childhood song not only do children use mathematical terminology with the numbers 1-10. There is also terminology used to describe positioning and size. I will use bold on the font to highlight the mathematical terminology.

ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, FIVE!

One, two, three, four, five,

Once I caught a fish alive,

Six, seven, eight, nine, ten,

Then I let it go again.

Why did you let it go?

Because it bit my finger so.

Which finger did it bite?

This little finger on the right.

Numbers are everywhere we go but why do we have them? Time, temperature, weight, height, phone numbers and even on the front of buses. Something I learned from this input was that in fact numbers were thought to have came about through trading a long, long time ago.

Number Systems have never crossed my mind before this recent maths input, to be honest. I have always just assumed that people everywhere stuck to the “normal” , being the European system i am used to. I was aware of Roman Numerals from past school projects and some watch collections. However, I was not aware it was still used, as such, but now that I have looked into this, I see that I must have been pretty narrow-minded to think that maths and numbers would be the same worldwide.

Picture from Google Images – education.scholastic.co.uk

From further research after the workshop, I realised there was far more number systems that again I had never heard of such as Hindu- Arabic, Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian, Chinese. Which are displayed in the chart below.

Picture from Google Images – www.earth360.com

The task in this workshop was to create our own working number system. Our group decided to use a line per number and join them up… it worked but the higher the number the longer it would take to write. So we decided to stop at 9 and put a simple dot next to our number 1 to make 10. Our number system was a success.