Introduction
Why learning aids?
“To see the twinkle in a child’s eye.”
Mathematics is one of the areas of the school curriculum that makes a great demand on teacher’s resourcefulness in creating relevant learning situations for formation of concepts in children’s minds. Mere telling without exposing children to learning experiences causes havoc in the learning process. Training children in acquisition of skills through imitative and repetitive exercises continues to be considered respectable as it carries the backing of tradition. Skill is by and large the pay-off of drill in reciting, reading and writing. engendering dependent learning. Even the infants in nursery schools are subjected to this, though it runs counter to their nature. The benefits are seen to be short term with no development of insight into or taste for mathematical thinking.
Recent research findings in different centres of the world bear ample testimony to the need for adoption of strategies that provide children appropriate and adequate experiences for abstracting ideas and finding their way to get at concepts with long term benefits characterised by learning through self-confidence and initiative.
Mathematical concepts grow up in complexity and depth and children can be expected to arrive only if they are helped to be alive to them according to their levels of maturity and attainment. Since mathematics is a highly linked body of knowledge, the start given in primary and pre-primary schools is extremely crucial. Time has come to judge the worth of an item and clear it for being given a place in the syllabus only after examining its concretisation potentials.
The child is fascinated by the reality around it and is on an exploration spree right from its birth to find order and meaning in the big booming confusion in which the child finds itself. In this romantic venture the child is guided by its instinct and intuition.
Instead of helping the child to continue its efforts in exploration, the teacher is often seen to come between the child and the reality and substitute hasty verbalism and symbolism under the ostensible reason of promoting sheltered learning to pass examinations with the result that the child finds itself blocked and, strait-jacketed and has to struggle for access to reality to blossom into an independent learner. As the child climbs up the ladder of mathematical learning.
the child finds itself compelled to do artificial if not meaningless things to its utter dismay and disappointment, but many reconcile themselves to the ‘way of the world’, while a few manage with their
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