3 - 5 years
There are many opportunities for Early Years pupils to start to summarise as they remember events and recount what was important. In maths, they start to sense the abstraction of number: they can count three bears, three bricks, three friends, etc and formulate an abstraction of ‘three-ness’.
5 - 7 years
In history, pupils consider viewpoints as they roleplay famous people. They study maps in geography, learning how to add places of interest and to ignore detail; they use world maps and create local maps and so start to see different layers of abstraction. Written forms of abstraction become more common: a story is abstracted to a plan in English, and the children work with graphs in science.
7 - 11 years
Pupils continue to become more experienced in abstraction. They reflect on what they know and create summaries in pre- and post-topic assessments, recording the most-important facts and so creating an abstraction of their understanding. They can consider the level of detail in their summaries; they may add more detail to a story plan as they write. They might consider a period in history at global, national, local and even individual level. When reporting and discussing, they’ll consider the most-significant aspects, they’ll compare and contrast. In presentations, they’ll focus on the representation of key information whilst leaving to one side many details.
Encourage pupils learning to program to create their own games or simulations, thinking carefully about what detail to include or exclude: an animation of the water cycle should include only the key steps at "big picture" level. When learning about one of the technical aspects of computers, a very simplified abstraction activity is to roleplay the internet using slips of paper to represent packets of data moving around the system. This helps children learn about data packets, servers and IP addresses.
Pupils create simulations of real-world systems such as the Water Cycle.
They select and model the features that are most important.