Concrete, Pictorial, Abstract: An Introduction

Hi, I'm Rebecca and in this film I'm going to give you an introduction to the concrete, pictorial and abstract approach to mathematics, usually known as cpa. Now, many children and adults find maths hard because it's so abstract. And the CPA approach helps children to approach new concepts in a familiar and tangible way. So let's see what that looks like. Here we have a problem. Sarah has eight cupcakes to share between four friends. How many cupcakes does each friend get? And we start with the concrete approach. This is the doing stage and it's hands on. All new concepts are introduced in this way where children can manipulate the maths. Here I've got counters to represent the cupcakes and children can move them around to show that actually each child would end up with two cupcakes. Then we move on to the pictorial stage. This is really important, children to use pictures and models to make sense of the maths. So here they could use the pictures to show that you would put two cupcakes on each plate. And finally we come to the abstract stage. Once children have shown that they understand a concept, the teacher can introduce abstract things such as symbols. In his case it would be the division symbol. And for this calculation we would be looking at 8 divided by 4 equals 2. So there you go, an introduction to concrete, pictorial and abstract approach to mathematics.