Early Years

Representation Pages in Early Childhood? What and Why?

Mequè Edo|23/05/2025|8 min read

In collaboration with: Laura Puchades

Representation Pages in Early Childhood? What and Why?

In the article Paper-Based Recording in Early Childhood Education: Yes or No, and Why? we looked at the importance of this activity as a way to conclude cross-curricular, hands-on, and lived learning experiences. We also saw its great potential in developing abstract thinking: creating a representation page at the end of a workshop helps children retain the essence of what they experienced, focusing on the mathematical relationship explored, but in a different format. It offers them a personal and individual moment of reflection to express what they are learning.

In this second part, we’ll explore different types of representation children can create after completing an interdisciplinary and hands-on activity, avoiding tasks that can be completed quickly and don’t require any real “thinking”—just copying or coloring. We know that in early childhood, students are in the midst of developing their graphomotor skills; therefore, using a variety of representation page types supports their developmental process.

In our proposal, you will find four types of representation pages; that is, four types of records which, depending on the format, will offer students different challenges and possibilities for response.

Let’s discover what they are and look at some examples:

1. Representation pages with stickers:

Sometimes, difficulties in expressing ideas on paper are due to the students’ graphomotor level. This difficulty can divert us from the specific goal intended for the activity and may prevent or hinder the moment of individual reflection. This type of page includes stickers, which serve as support and help students focus their attention on the mathematical ideas they want to express, overcoming the barrier of fine motor skills.

Let’s look at an example from Kindergarten:

After a workshop in which we talk about double-entry tables, we ask the students to choose the attributes for organizing the material and to place the labels on the vertical and horizontal axes, and then to stick all the flat shapes in the corresponding places.

2. Representation pages with visual support:

The moment of representation after a hands-on, playful, and experiential workshop can be challenging when different dynamics and materials have been presented. When there are several “distracting” factors that might lead students away from the intended goal, presenting a page with visual support or an illustration can serve as scaffolding to help them select a specific moment to represent. This type of page presents a less open-ended challenge than a blank one—because we’re inviting them to depict a particular moment from the activity. However, the type of representation, and therefore the response, remains open-ended: there will be as many different representations as there are students in the classroom.

Let’s look at another example from Kindergarten:

After a hands-on workshop where they build and classify flat shapes, we encourage students to represent some of the shapes they created using the geoboard on the page.

3. Blank representation pages:

With this type of page, which offers no visual or structural support, we ask students to choose, represent, and explain a moment from the session—what happened or what they learned. It’s an open-ended prompt with an open-ended response; we offer them the chance to make visible what they are taking away from the workshop. In the article The Blank Page in Early Childhood: How and Why?, we will go into more detail about this type of representation page.

Let’s look at an example from Transitional Kindergarten:

We offer a blank representation page so that students can depict and explain what they did in a workshop where we talked about the shoes we’re wearing and asked ourselves which type is the most common. We collect the data, organize it, and create a bar graph, which we then interpret to answer the initial question.

4. Special:

The representation page, used as a tool to support and reflect learning, is most often used at the end of the session as a conclusion. However, it can also be used during the session. When used this way—as a process page—we refer to it as “special” because it doesn’t fall into any of the previous categories, but it supports students through different learning situations. These pages may include illustrations or materials that complement the session and help students acquire learning in a more meaningful way. They might take the form of game boards, die-cut elements for construction, and so on.

Let’s look at an example from Preschool:

After identifying and sorting items by size (big, medium, and small) through a story, we all play bingo together by covering the images that match the description—for example, “medium bed,” “small spoon,” and so on.

And in these pages, what kind of challenge is being posed? And what kind of response do we expect from the students?

Next, we’ll look at the types of challenges and responses, along with some examples.

1. Closed challenge pages with multiple possible answers:

In this case, the task instruction is closed—that is, it clearly tells the students what is expected of them—but there are multiple valid answers. This often happens when stickers are involved, because before solving the challenge, students have to plan what to do and think about the response they want to express.

With the pages that include visual support, we also give students a specific instruction or ask them to represent a particular moment from the activity. However, in this case, the responses we get are open-ended: students can represent the moment however they choose (with words, drawings, letters, numbers, symbols, etc.).

Here are a couple of examples:

In this page from Transitional Kindergarten using stickers, students can create dichotomous classifications and choose which relationship they want to represent. The final result is not the most important part—the focus is on the process and the discussion that follows the classification. The stickers allow for multiple valid responses: hats/no hats, food/not food, utensils/not utensils, I like it/I don’t like it…

In this case, the prompt will be closed but assigned randomly to each student. That is, by picking a card with a number indicating how many bottles are on the wall, each student receives a closed task—but it’s different from their classmates’. This way, the responses to the activity will be varied.

Also in Transitional Kindergarten, after playing with the numbers 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and 0 through the song “There Are 5 Bottles,” we ask the students to choose a number card from 0 to 5 and invite them to represent that number of bottles on the shelf in the page, and to show how many would be on the floor to make a total of 5.

2. Closed Challenge Pages with a Single Correct Answer

We’ve added a new type of representation page—one with a closed challenge and a single correct answer—in order to explore and reflect on what this approach can offer. There is only one of these pages in Preschool, two in Transitional Kindergarten, and one in Kindergarten, and they can be used in different ways.

One option is the classic approach: students complete the task individually, and their response can give us insight into their independent understanding of the content. But the task can also be completed collaboratively, in pairs or small groups. As a shared challenge, it invites them to talk, share what each one knows, and compare “what they know at that moment” in order to better construct the concepts represented on the page.

We invite you to use these new proposals in the way that feels most comfortable for you—and to share your impressions with us.

Let’s look at an example from Preschool:

After completing the workshop in which, through hands-on activities, students form groups within the range of 1 to 5, we offer this page. They are invited to complete each collection by adding the necessary objects so that there is one for each placeholder. We can observe that both the challenge and the expected response are closed, which allows the teacher to check whether the student feels confident constructing quantities up to five. We also note that there are more stickers than needed, so students must think about how many are necessary for each collection and choose which ones to place based on personal criteria. Therefore, even though it is a closed mathematical response page, the final execution varies from student to student.

3. Open-Ended Challenge Pages with Open-Ended Responses

Students choose what they want to explain, which moment they want to represent, and how they want to do it—that is, which language or form they want to use. These are the blank pages. We know that the more varied the responses we receive, the more confident we can be that we’ve framed the task well. We’ll go into more detail about this in the next article.

What Do We Offer in Each Grade?

The following table shows the number of pages of each type, by grade level:

We observe that in Preschool, since this is the first time students encounter representation tasks—and considering their developmental stage—there are fewer pages than in the two following grades. We also notice that closed challenge pages are more frequent than open ones. This gradual approach allows us to support students as they build the skills needed to eventually complete a blank page with an open-ended challenge and open-ended response.

In Transitional Kindergarten and Kindergarten, we still include some pages with a closed challenge and open response, because depending on the type of session, they can be meaningful. However, we also see that pages with open-ended prompts and responses take on greater importance. These pages demand higher cognitive engagement and encourage deeper thinking and learning.

In conclusion, we’ve explored the value of introducing paper-based recording in early childhood education as a way to close activities—fostering reflection and abstraction of the mathematical content experienced. We’ve also seen the benefit of offering different types of pages—with stickers, with visual support, blank pages, and special ones—each with its own purpose and challenge for students. In addition, we’ve looked at the variety of demands and types of responses they may elicit.

Now, we invite you—educators—to use these pages while reflecting on their potential, and to share your insights with us so we can continue growing and improving together.

Laura Puchades i Mequè Edo