Growing Young Mathematicians: Engaging Young Learners with Mathematics through Designing and Planting a Garden

Children use mathematics to make sense of their world long before they enter formal school settings by sorting and comparing objects, counting, and using mathematical reasoning. When children enter formal school settings, they are often exposed to decontextualized approaches of learning mathematics. In this article, I argue that moving beyond the walls of the classroom into a classroom garden engages young children with mathematics and increases children's early mathematical reasoning and mathematical identity development. Findings suggest working in a classroom garden during an after-school program over the course of one semester provided young children with multiple, and diverse, opportunities to engage with mathematical experiences, mathematical reasoning, and mathematical identity development. Through regular participation in a variety of gardening activities focused on designing and planting, young children engaged in mathematic-rich dialogue utilizing complex and abstract mathematic process skills such as making sense of problems and persevering in solving them, constructing viable arguments, critiquing the reasoning of others, strategically using appropriate tools, as well as looking for structure regularity in repeated reasoning.