ABSTRACT
The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics has established five process standards that children should use to acquire and apply mathematical content knowledge: problem solving, reasoning and proof, communication, connections, and representations. Teachers can work with colleagues to convey the process standards in child-friendly language, then decide how to gradually incorporate these standards into the math curriculum. In order for young children to make sense of a problem, they have to understand the words, symbols, and numbers in the problem. When children are in kindergarten, they begin to move away from the concrete stage of learning and begin to pair symbols with objects or drawings to represent problem-solving situations. Young children can be taught at an early age to justify their answers, as well as share their reasoning with others, so they can start to build a repertoire of strategies and get in the habit of producing an explanation.
