宝保育所特別研究報告（Ⅱ）

Abstract

The author investigates how young children acquire the concept of numbers at Takara daycare center in Tsuru under a grant from Tsuru University for Special Researches. The results of five experiments which treated number concepts are explained and introduced in this paper. We carried out the first experiment on July 26 with a class of 3-year old children. In this experiment we examined the children’s abilities of comparing the cardinalities, of understanding the equality of cardinalities smaller than 6, and of making one-to-one correspondence between beat and cardinality fewer than 4. The contents of the second experiment, which was conducted on July 28 with a class of 4- year old children, were similar to those of the first one. The third one, which was conducted on August 5 with a class of 4-year old children, treated the conservative ability of cardinality fewer than 6, counting ability less than 4, corresponding abilities to a quantity of cardinality fewer than 4, understanding of ordering of objects of cardinality fewer than 4, and comparing ability of using blocks. The fourth experiment, which was conducted on August 24 with a class of 5-year old children, treated the ordering ability of objects of cardinality fewer than 6, telling a cardinality of fewer than 6, counting ability of less than 6, understanding of successive and predecessive number of a number less than 6. The fifth experiment, which was conducted on September 13 with a class of 5-year old children, treated the conceptual understanding of subtraction, understanding of increasing, comparing ability of cardinalities by blocks, making blocks of cardinality 5, representing quantity with blocks of cardinality 5, and comparing ability of quantities by their five cardinality block representation.