Teachers’ opinions about mathematics have an important role in their interaction with children, time planning, the selection of methods, techniques, and activities, and implementation. Thus, this study aimed to examine preservice preschool teachers’ perceptions of the concepts of “mathematics” and “teaching mathematics” through metaphors. To this end, it used phenomenology,which is a form of qualitative research. 132 preservice teachers studying preschool education at a state university in the 2019-2020 academic year participated in the study. To explore preservice preschool teachers’ perceptions of mathematics and teaching mathematics, the data were collected by asking them to complete the following sentences: “Mathematics is like ..... because .....”, and “Teaching mathematics is like ..... because .....”. The data were analysed using content analysis. The analysis results showed that the preschool preservice teachers produced 87 metaphors for the concept of “mathematics” and 101 metaphors for the concept of “teaching mathematics”. These metaphors were categorised based on their common characteristics and attributes. A total of 12 categories were obtained: necessity, difficult, desire/emotion, enjoyable/fun, eternity, and other for the concept of “mathematics”; and necessity, difficult, labour/effort, enjoyable/fun, emotion, and other for the concept of “teaching mathematics”.