Comparison
- Encourage children to share items between two people or toys.
Counting
- Capitalise on children’s fascination with counting by joining in when they count in games.
- Enjoy counting forwards and back (sometimes to much higher numbers). Use different voices, eg high or growly.
- Use opportunities within daily routines to support children’s developing sense of number.
- Model and encourage counting and representing numbers within role play, eg making a telephone call using a list of numbers.
- Value children’s own mathematical representations within their pretend play.
Cardinality
- When counting with children, playfully make deliberate mistakes for fun, expecting children to correct them.
- Model writing numerals, eg on badges, birthday cards and banners.
- When counting objects with children emphasise the cardinal principle: 1, 2, 3, there are three cups.
- Invite children to count out a small number of things from a larger group, eg Can you get five crackers?
- Encourage children to use their fingers to show an amount, eg when asking another child to share resources, to show on their fingers how many they need.
- Emphasise the one more, one less pattern in rhymes and traditional tales, asking children to predict the next number.
- Model wondering and talking about how you might solve a number problem.
- Value and support children to use their own graphics when problem solving.
- Encourage children to freely communicate their mathematical thinking through gesture, talk and graphical signs.
Spatial Reasoning
- When children are exploring, use the language of position and direction in context (in, on, inside, under, over; progressing to between, beside, next to through, along — including relative terms which depend on where you are, eg behind, in front of, forwards, backwards) using equivalent terms for these in home languages through liaison with families where possible.
- On walks, in pictures or while playing, point out how things or people that are farther away look smaller.
- Support children in their problem solving when they are creating rail tracks and road layouts, eg by flipping over pieces.
- In block play, sensitively support and challenge experienced builders to make ramps, bridges and enclosures.
- Encourage children to persevere with jigsaws, perhaps demonstrating “hovering” jigsaw pieces to check if they will fit.
Shape
- Help children to choose shapes for a purpose, eg a triangular block for a roof and the wedge-shaped block for a ramp.
- Offer an appropriate or inappropriate shape for what you think the child’s purpose might be to investigate their thinking.
- As children experience shapes, use informal language (eg slanty, pointy, twisty, wiggly, bumpy), common shape names (eg cylinder, cone, circle, square) and “nearly” shapes (eg This is almost a square but it’s got curvy corners). Find out and use equivalent terms for shapes in home languages.
- Discuss how shapes can be partitioned in everyday contexts, eg cutting food in different ways.
- Value children’s constructions and solutions to problems they have set themselves and talk about how the shapes have combined to make new shapes.
Pattern
- Whilst playing alongside children, model simple repeating patterns of two or three items and encourage children to create and continue patterns.
- Demonstrate arranging objects in spatial patterns when building, collaging or playing with loose parts.
- Draw children’s attention to patterns around them including from a range of cultures.
- When making patterns, help children to solve problems.
Measures
- During play, model comparing lengths and distances.
- Look out for meaningful opportunities for children to compare by length, weight, capacity and time using comparative language (longer/shorter, heavier/lighter, holds more/holds less, longer time/shorter time).
- Encourage children to participate in seesaw and balance scale play.
- Encourage children to respond to and use words such as before, after, soon or later when talking about routines, recent events and events in a story or rhyme.