Numeracy and Mathematics Guest Blogs

This week, Claudette White from Beancross Nursery discusses a play based approach to building strong foundations in numeracy and mathematics.

Natural Numeracy

Claudette Wright

Beancross Nursery, Grangemouth

Twitter: @beanxnursery

May 2021

Natural Numeracy is an approach in which Falkirk Council supports as part of the ‘Play is the Way’ campaign. Providing our youngest children the opportunity to be surrounded by rich natural numeracy provocations and environments. This encourages a positive link with foundational numeracy and mathematic development and, creates a positive attitude towards this learning. Natural Numeracy plays a vital role within children’s understanding and knowledge of the key core numeracy concepts (matching, sorting & classifying, shape, Number & Counting, Measure, position & movement). Building the Curriculum 2 suggest that children’s understanding of these core concepts should be developed using a blend of approaches (spontaneous play, planned purposeful play, real life experiences, investigation and exploration and focused learning and teaching). Natural Numeracy is a simple and effective approach to support children’s development across the curriculum.

“Numeracy is the ability to apply maths concepts in all areas of life. Children start learning foundational numeracy skills from the time they’re born. This learning happens from watching and experiencing numeracy in action in everyday life and from engaging in play and exploration.”

A play based planning approach is most effective when implementing natural numeracy experiences. We should consider our interactions, experiences and spaces and ask ourselves do these promote high quality numeracy development? Is there scope for children to experience breadth and challenge throughout the numeracy curriculum? Tune into your children’s interests, do children have agency to develop their own innovative and creative thinking towards mathematic and numeracy development?

It is useful to consider the principles for curriculum design when planning numeracy experiences. Children should have Personalisation and Choice, the experience should be responsive to the individual child’s needs and support their aptitudes and talents and encourage children to make informed choices. There should be a degree of Challenge and Enjoyment throughout the experiences, understand where your children are within their numeracy development and provide resources/experiences which challenges their learning. Progression and Depth are important principles within children’s numeracy development. Expand on children’ numeracy learning, ensure that the environments and experiences extend children’s learning. Carefully consider the depth of numeracy development and learning. Ensure that children are given the opportunity to explore a range of numeracy concepts which will deepen their understanding and promote them to inquire more about their numeracy learning. Relevance, Coherence and Breadth are also other important principles to consider. Ensuring that you your experiences and environments are rich with real life natural numeracy objects such as; clocks, measuring jugs, timers, measuring tapes, funnels, rulers, scales and recipes, sticks, stoned, leaves etc, this enables children to make connections and apply learning within real life contexts. Tailor your experience to suit individual children. Observe what matters to your children and provide suitable resources/experience which cover a range of numeracy concepts. Numeracy is a lifelong skill which begins at the earliest age. Numeracy resources/experiences/language should be rich in all areas of your setting to engage children in a wide range of experiences within different contexts.

We know that family engagement and improving outcomes within numeracy are national education priorities. Getting these factors embedded within our settings enables positive and ambitious pathways to success. It fosters positive attitudes which influence life-long learning for both the child and families. Involving our families is one of the main jigsaw pieces within our empowered system. Sometimes our families do require support to be able to support their child with numeracy development. Engaging our families within their child’s experiences within the setting allows us to upskill and create continuous learning conditions within the setting and at home. To further support numeracy development within Beancross, we set up ‘Challenge Stations’ these were intentionally designed using the Curriculum E’s and O’s to ensure there was a broad range of experiences and outcomes covered. These challenge stations were carefully designed as a targeted and universal approach to promote equity and family engagement, which supported numeracy development for our children who required the most support and who required challenge within their numeracy development.

Our focus with this station was on estimation. Our children and families were encouraged to estimate how many objects were in the cups. We also then encouraged children to count out the objects to see how many was there. This supported stable order, 1:1 correspondence, cardinality, subitising and order irrelevance. Finally to challenge this learning further children could identify the correct numeral to the amount and record this.

We ensured that these stations were relevant to children’s interests. They were coherent, using real life experiences for children to consolidate learning. We ensured that personalisation and choice was considered as we created a range of stations around the room to suit each child’s choice/interests, at every station there was an option to extend learning further by adding on a more in-depth context or scale this back to suit individual children’s learning stages/needs.


To further support this, we ensured that we involved our families within this experience by providing the opportunity for our children and families to complete these challenges at home. Families were given the appropriate resources to complete these challenges. To further extend this learning, families were then able to create their own challenges, to then bring back into the nursery. Family feedback has been outstanding following on from this. Some families have said “I have always struggled with helping my child with counting, I never knew it could be this fun”. “The whole family loved this experience”. And finally “X can’t wait for Fridays to get her numeracy challenges home, this has been a good way to involve the whole family with counting”.

Have a look at our video to see how Beancross ELCC develop mathematic/Numeracy Development, within our setting.


Further Reading to promote Numeracy: