ABSTRACT
This paper considers how an understanding of the nonlinear dynamic processes by which children younger than 9 years of age construct meaning might influence the ways in which their educators might match instruction. There is abundant evidence that conceptual integration—the construction of meaning—is a nonlinear, dynamic process. Scholars are discovering that seemingly random nonlinear events follow a deeper, underlying pattern. Physicists, biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, economists, anthropologists, linguists, and artists, among others at the frontiers of their fields, have studied nonlinear dynamic systems1.2 They have studied turbulence, the moments when states of matter change. They are finding ways to measure fractal relationships, the rough edges of the world, as in broccoli and jagged shorelines (McDermott, 1983).
