Preservice Teachers’ Development of Literacy-Themed Mathematics Instruction for Early Childhood Classrooms

There is a history of innovative educators who have taught mathematics through literacy-based activities that enable children to connect new mathematical knowledge using children’s real-life experiences. The picture book, Math Curse, was utilized as the stimulus for 72 preservice teachers to analyze the structure and content of the mathematics-themed storybook and, subsequently write their own version of such a story. The stories were coded for content themes and coverage of mathematical content. The stories covered all major mathematical content areas, around themes such as family life, school, and sports. The research findings illustrate how preservice teachers could creatively generate mathematically focused stories for students so that young children could identify with the characters and storylines and imagine how mathematical concepts apply in everyday activities. This research with preservice teachers provided preservice teachers with knowledge and insights into how they could embed mathematics instruction into a story format. It also increased the likelihood that the preservice teachers could apply this knowledge in their future classrooms.