Formas con Voz: Storytelling as a Window Into Preschoolers’ Geometric Reasoning

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 7:45 am - Gold 4
  In Roundtable Session: Dismantling educational and socio-cultural borders: Bilingualism is here to stay!

Abstract

This study examines how storytelling and guided play with tangram tasks support emergent bilingual preschoolers’ spatial reasoning and geometric understanding. Eighteen preschoolers (ages 3–5) participated in a guided play activity where, following a storytelling prompt, they used tangram pieces to create objects designed to protect pigs from a wolf. Analyses show that children’s stories, translanguaging, and multimodal expressions revealed geometric thinking that might have remained hidden in static assessments that focus on final products alone. By embedding geometric tasks in narrative contexts and children’s home languages, this work highlights the central role of language in early math learning. Findings support the need for linguistically responsive pedagogy that treats multilingual and multimodal practices as vital to young children’s mathematical thinking.

Authors

• Dafne Zanelli, Purdue University

• Brenda Sarmiento-Quezada, Purdue University

• Laura Bofferding, Purdue University

• Yi Zhu, Purdue University