The Number Curriculum in Early Childhood Education. An Analysis from an International Perspective

This article carries out an analysis of international guidelines on teaching numbers in general and the acquisition of number sense particularly, during Early Childhood Education. These guidelines provide a basis for analysing the national curriculum and for offering some scaffolding to contribute towards the development of numerical thinking in early ages. The study concludes that teaching practice needs to be centred on understanding numbers, on different representations of them (avoiding the insistence on teaching conventional notation) and on the meaning of basic operations.