ALGEBRAIC THINKING IN THE EARLY YEARS OF ELEMENTARY SCHOOL:

TEACHING AND LEARNING GUIDELINES AND PRACTICES

Abstract

To emphasize the critical articulation between curricular directions and teaching practices, this article aims to discuss curricular guidelines about the teaching objectives concerning the algebra content for the early years of elementary school and reflect on aspects related to pedagogical work with the symbol of equality in the process development of algebraic thinking. The results presented comprise part of those obtained in the doctoral research of Gomes (2020). For the first objective, the results of an extensive documentary research carried out on official Brazilian documents were used. For the second objective, we present part of the results of a qualitative research of the descriptive and interpretive type carried out in classes of 4th and 5th grades of a public institution. We conclude that practices with the equality symbol enhance the knowledge of the properties of numbers and mathematical operations, despite this, document guidelines prioritize pedagogical work with sequences and patterns in the process of introducing algebra.