Activities

Involves providing children with opportunities to develop and improve their skills in counting, understanding and using numbers, calculating simple addition and subtraction problems; and to describe shapes, spaces, and measures.

Counting can be a tricky strategy for young children as they learn to understand the value of numbers. We teach numbers through every day counting activities, counting children, reminding them to include themselves. We sing counting songs and use our fingers when working with values up to ten. We play sorting games to find out how many boys and girls are here and ask children to work out which is the ‘biggest’ group, or which group has more and less. We teach number as a value by taking every opportunity to count objects, how many sticks, how many pieces of apple during snack. Children’s learning of numbers is extended on an individual basis, at their pace and level.

We use everyday language to talk about size, weight, capacity, position, distance, time and money to compare quantities and objects and to solve problems. Water play is used to develop an understanding of capacity through active involvement. At group times we play matching games so that children can recognise similarities and differences as a foundation for creating and recognising patterns as their learning is extended. Children and staff explore characteristics of everyday objects and shapes and use mathematical language to describe them in a context that children can understand.