Mathematics
The Early Years Goals are Numbers and Shape, Space and Measures
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.
This area supports children’s understanding in different situations by providing opportunities to explore, practise, learn and talk. They practise skills and gain confidence and competence. To give children the best opportunities through Positive Relationships children use mathematical words and ideas in their play. Enabling Environments have resources for counting, calculating and shape available indoors and outdoors. In Learning and Development, stories, songs and imaginative play help with mathematical understanding.
The children learn mathematics and numeracy through activities such as counting out conkers and sorting leaves.
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They also look for recurring patterns in nature or shapes such as triangles and circles.
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3 D objects such a s cubes and spheres can be explored through sculpting clay and picking tomatoes.
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They can investigate estimation, weights and measures through activities such as making a mud pie. We may comment, "This pot is heavy' or "That stick is too long to fit in there."
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Proportion and division can also be explored with language such as ' What happens if we break it in half?'
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Other examples on how we incorporate numeracy in everyday activities:
When collecting leaves for craft, language such as "Can you all go and collect 3 sticks." "Have we got enough?' 'How many more do we need to make 10?"
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"Let's give Lucy 2, how many do we have now?"
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Sorting shapes into size order and colour bingo cards..
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Comparisons, such as "This conker is bigger than that one!"
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Keeping score in games and recording the number of woodlice found under a rock or counting the legs on a spider.
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"Today it is Lucy's birthday, lets make a cake" is something you hear the staff say regularly at WFPS. We talk about the end product, we count the layers of sponge, (mud) how many candles, (sticks) and how many decorations (leaves). We use our number conker line to help us count. We regularly have Willow's Bake off and the two teams of children have the same ingredients and as they turn over their cake tins, some mud cakes are firm and others are gooey and runny, so we chat how much water we added and how the structure of each cake changes depending on the volume of mud and water used. We make a hopscotch grid, using sticks for numbers, so they can visually see the numbers as they hop, skip and jump and we have a willow basket ball net, so the children can count as they throw pine cones through the net.