ABSTRACT
Initial sensory levels of play enable children to find out about the properties of objects, but as learning progresses, children use the objects themselves as props for thinking, and often watching and listening to what children do with them illustrates the ways in which they are thinking. Using objects as tokens to tally events or scores within games makes them into representations connected to purposeful counting and to number value. Many common things like pebbles, sticks, cups, bricks, bobbins, bead strings or fingers can be used as tokens that represent small numbers. Children naturally use them in many contexts such as outdoor play, sand play or domestic play or games. Most people recognise the potential for a connection between fingers and learning to count, but the depth of their connection to our mathematical brain is not fully exploited by mainstream curriculum thinking.
