Comparison/ Counting
- Provide buckets and bags for children to create collections of objects which they can count.
- Provide mark-making materials indoors and outdoors for children to represent their own ideas in play.
Cardinality (How many?)
- Provide opportunities for children to explore cardinality in the environment using self-correcting resources, e.g. jigsaw with two ducks and the number two, or displays showing the numeral and the number of items.
- Sing counting songs and rhymes which help to develop children’s understanding of number.
- Say the counting sequence going to higher numbers, in a variety of contexts, indoors and out, and sometimes counting backwards.
Spatial Awareness
- Design outdoor spaces where children can learn through a variety of spatial experiences (going under, over, around, on top, through) and hear spatial language in context.
- Encourage children to freely communicate their mathematical thinking through gesture, talk and graphical signs.
- Plan stimulating indoor and outdoor spaces where children make choices about where to go and create their own routes. Provide materials to create trails.
- Provide resources for transporting.
Shape
- Provide a range of inset and jigsaw puzzles of increasing complexity for children to choose.
- Provide a variety of construction materials including some with identical pieces so that children freely explore same and different.
Pattern
- Provide a range of natural and everyday materials, as well as blocks and shapes, with which to make patterns.
- Plan opportunities for children to experience pattern such as percussion, music and action games that involve repeated sounds or actions.
Measures
- Provide similar items of contrasting sizes so that children have many opportunities to encounter the language of size.
- Provide resources with clearly different weights to support direct comparison, and something to carry them in.
- Provide equipment with varied capacities and shapes in the sand, water, mud kitchen and role play areas.