In this paper we study how a student begins to acquire the concept of the derivative, what kind of representations he acquires and how he connects these representations. A teaching period, in which different perceptual and symbolic representation were emphasized, was carried out and task based interviews conducted to five students. The students used several different kinds of representations to process the derivative. They were all able to consider the derivative as an object by using perceptual representations at an early stage of the acquisition process. Also they all could calculate the derivative at a point by using symbolic representations. They all formed perceptual representations of the limiting process of the difference quotient but they would still need guidance to connect them to symbolic representations. [For complete proceedings, see ED489538.]