Comparison/ Counting
- Provide a numeral rich environment, e.g. in role-play areas, mud-kitchen recipes, numbers on trikes and toilet doors.
- Provide numerals that children can pick up and use within all aspects of their play.
- Provide resources indoors and outside for children to explore and talk about higher numbers.
- Model using objects to illustrate counting songs, rhymes and number stories, sometimes using pictures and numerals, to enable children to use those resources independently.
- Play with either dot or numeral dice. Discuss that six on the dice is worth more than four.
- Provide a variety of mathematical picture books and share them as part of “warm and cuddly” maths times.
- Explore different arrangements of the same number, e.g. partitioning five in different ways; hiding one group and “guessing” the hidden number.
Cardinality
- Model counting items rhythmically, including objects into a container, claps or drumbeats.
- Support children to choose how to arrange collections of two, three and four objects in different ways.
- Provide spaces to display children’s ongoing mathematical thinking, e.g. their own ways of representing their thinking, and scribing children’s words.
Spatial Awareness
- Provide spaces to display children’s ongoing mathematical thinking, e.g. their own ways of representing their thinking and scribing children’s words.
- Provide opportunities for children to explore position themselves inside, behind, on top and so on.
- Provide picture books to stimulate discussion about position and direction.
- Create trails and treasure hunts with the children.
- Organise the indoor and outdoor environment with outlines for objects or specific places for children to tidy up items by fitting them into the designated space.
Shape
- Provide differently shaped resources to handle, carry, move and explore.
- Provide large and small blocks and boxes for construction both indoors and outdoors.
Pattern
- Provide a range of items for free exploration of patterning indoors and outdoors including natural materials, pattern blocks, loose parts, mats, trays and strips.
- Encourage children to join in with body patterns or repeating sections of songs.
- Pause to encourage prediction when enjoying stories and rhymes with repeating elements, sometimes using props.
- Emphasise the repeating pattern when turn taking.
- Provide patterned resources including those representing a range of cultures, such as clothing, fabrics or wrapping paper.
Measures
- Provide problem-solving opportunities indoors and outdoors for comparing length, weight and capacity, e.g. Which is the best bottle so we’ll have enough drink for everyone at the picnic?
- Ask children to predict What happens next? using visual timetables, books and stories.
- Provide items that can be ordered by size, such as plates and clothes in role play.