Abstract
One of the banes of mathematics teaching in schools, more so in pre-schools, is to straight away start with the abstract aspects of the subject with providing any prior perceptual learning and concrete experiences.
Keeping this in view, a board-game was designed for pedagogical experimentation along with a worksheet for a formalized perceptual learning experience for pre-school students (4-5 years age group) for the pre-number concepts like sequencing, matching, discriminating; one-to-one correspondence and equivalent sets.
The research-and-development methodology was used for the present study. For the board-game, a cubical dice was made with a thick paper with a different pattern on its six faces. A square board was made with four patterns selected at random from the six on the dice to be fixed on the four sides of the board. Four students played the game with the throw of the dice and use of the buttons as counters.
A worksheet was designed to be filled with tallies to formalize learning of pre-number concepts. The tallies with the move due to the throw of the dice gave o feel for absence or a presence of a pattern, equivalence of tallies and one-to-one correspondence. The pedagogical experiment in the use of the board-game was performed on four students of a pre-school in the age group of four plus seen by 10 teachers who reacted positively to the use of the board game,
Keywords: Board-game, concrete experience, mathematics pedagogy, perceptual learning, pre-number concepts
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