Chapter 1: Introduction

This book is about children's out-of-school mathematics learning. Our interest in this area stems from several years of research working with children, parents and teachers, exploring ways in which children think and learn about mathematics out of school, and thinking about ways in which this does and does not align with the kinds of mathematical thinking and learning with which children are expected to engage in the classroom. We are going to start this book by explaining why we think this is an important book to write, and what we hope to achieve by writing it.

Children engage in a wide range of different forms of mathematical thinking and learning out of school that can often be more sophisticated than would be expected of them in the classroom. This will be one of the key themes of the book, as we explore children's play and activity and discuss ways in which we have worked with children and families to find the mathematics in out-of-school lives. There are two important caveats to the claim that children are engaging in sophisticated mathematics outside of the classroom, however. The first is that children are, on the whole, unaware of the mathematics with which they are engaging. This is not to say that children's thinking is disordered or that they are not making good decisions in their contexts, but that children do not always make connections between the thinking that they do outside of school that we might describe as ‘mathematical’ thinking and their experiences of classroom mathematics. The second caveat is that there are considerable disparities among children's opportunities to engage in activities leading to different forms of mathematical thinking and learning out of school that often align with different social demographic markers. Both of these caveats remind us that out-of-school learning is a challenging phenomenon to study (see also Rose et al., 2022), and that questions about relationships between out-of-school learning and the classroom are complex. We will explore what the research literature can tell us about children's out-of-school thinking and learning later in this chapter and in Chapter 2, and we will begin to share what we have found in our own work in Chapters 3 and 4.