Learning to Share Fairly: The Importance of Spatial Reasoning in Early Partitioning Experiences

Young children often explore partitioning as the idea of fair sharing in contexts where equal parts are created and distributed based on spatial constructs of the objects, rather than enumerating parts or collections. However, the presence of spatial reasoning in children's early fraction experiences is implicit within much of the literature and has not been explored pedagogically in a range of early schooling contexts. This study reports on a selection of data from a larger Design Based Research study that demonstrates the power spatial reasoning plays in developing early partitioning. Implications for teaching and learning are discussed.