Nursery

Welcome to Nursery Maths!

At the Nursery, children are nurtured and allowed to learn and grow into confident and independent individuals, who are ready for the next challenges that school will offer them.

The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) is how the Government and early years professionals describe the time in your child’s life between birth and age 5. This is a very important stage as it helps your child get ready for school as well as preparing them for their future learning and successes. From when your child is born up until the age of 5, their early years’ experience should be happy, active, exciting, fun and secure; and support their development, care and learning needs.

In the early years (from birth to 5 years):

'Mathematics 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 measure.' (Statutory framework for EYFS, 2017)

Children will be introduced to:

• Counting from 1 to 20

• Ordering numbers from 1 to 20

• Adding and subtracting two single-digit numbers (using objects)

• Understanding doubling, halving and sharing.

What does Maths look like in Nursery?

In Nursery, Children are introduced to Maths in a fun and engaging way throughout all provision:

• Block play, role play, small world, sand and water play so that children realise their skills are transferable in play and showing children that mathematics has purpose by giving children real reasons to count.

• Talking about numbers and having opportunities to record and represent their own mathematics in their own meaningful ways.

• Singing songs and nursery rhymes supports children in being able to confidently recall numbers and understand the order of numbers.

• Daily routines, supported by visual prompts, help children develop awareness of time, helping them become familiar with sequences of events.

• Cooking activities and snack time provide meaningful reasons for children to count and apply maths to daily situations, as they sort, order, explore capacity, size, quantity, shape, time and solve problems.

The videos below aim to offer you some ideas of activities that you can do with your child to support their learning.

Please note!

Reading and writing numbers (as numerals) is highly abstract and doesn’t support any meaningful understanding of the value of number. We strongly recommend you avoid reading and writing numerals (1, 2, 3) until your child has a confident understanding of the value of simple numbers. More important than numerals is that your child a strong “feel” of numbers. The numerals can come later.

Counting

Children are exposed to counting from their earliest days, “One, two, three” says the parent swinging the baby in their arms.

Counting is really important: it gives children a sense of order and pattern. It’s important that children hear, and gradually join in with the pattern they recognise as counting.

They hear familiar number patterns forwards and backwards, especially in the songs and rhymes they enjoy in Nursery, “Five little ducks went swimming one day...”

There are so many ways to incorporate counting into daily routines and activities.

Seeing Numbers

Eventually, we want children’s familiarity with number to be so strong that they can “see” numbers of objects, without needing to count. This is called “subitising”. It’s an excellent way of assessing how confident your child is with numbers up to five.

Talking Numbers

Once children are confident subitisers, you can begin introducing new vocabulary that helps the child talk about how numbers are made up of small numbers put together. They can begin using the language of number sentences (and many children enjoy this feeling of being “grown up”).