Spatial experiences are part of our wider cultural lives, e.g. during a pōwhiri the manuhiri (visitors) gather at the waharoa (gateway) before moving across the marae ātea to the wharenui. Children make connections between people, places, and things as they move between and through spaces. This movement involves experiencing their relationships with distance and location and is related to large scale movement in space, such as in navigation, astronomy, and wayfaring traditions of Māori and Pacific cultures (Bishop 1991).
Connections between space and movement provide rich opportunities for children to explore using their senses (such as verbal, visual, touch) and to use language about space and measurement. For example, children might describe ‘magnitude’: tall, short, small, light, heavy, and describe ‘similarity and difference’: bigger, smaller, and so on.
Identifying and manipulating objects such as shapes are also ways of understanding space. For example, it is important for children to have many experiences of combining shapes together, pulling them apart and joining shapes to make patterns or constructions. Spatial thinking also involves recognising similarities and differences when shapes are moved (turned, flipped, slid), enlarged, or shrunk etc.
Spatial learning includes measurement in the early years because measurements such as length, area, and volume (or capacity) involve exploring, observing, experimenting and predicting, and all these involve spatial thinking including visualising.
