From statistics to pictogram creation: an example of contextual educational path in pre-primary school

Abstract

This interdisciplinary learning itinerary (mathematics and visual education) was carried out in a kindergarten in Canton Ticino following a contextual approach. In a first phase, the boys and girls carried out a whole statistical process, from the research question to the representation of the results. Two surveys were proposed: the first one aimed at understanding if in the houses of the pupils there were more cats or more dogs, the second one aimed at determining if in the kindergarten of Bioggio (Canton Ticino) there were more pupils or more students. This first phase showed that the main difficulty of the boys and girls was the representation of the results, and in particular the representation of equivalence classes (cat/dog, male/female). This kind of difficulty was addressed instructionally with the visual language of the pictogram, which accompanied the pupils through various reality tasks. Along the last stages of its development, the itinerary was structured to consolidate the pupils’ ability to create pictograms.