We decided to devote a week to Maths to promote Hope Pre-school’s commitment to developing a strong grounding in number and spatial reasoning skills in all areas of Maths including shape, space and measures. Becoming great mathematicians should be fun and maths experiences should encourage children to “have a go.”
In session we included many opportunities to explore resources promoting mathematical activity; we have a maths corner which is stocked with easily accessible manipulatives and trays with various numbers of compartments to encourage counting and comparing amounts,
Shape games were played that involved shape recognition and colour comparison,
We created our own floor snakes and ladders game, using animal
counters to travel around the board and large, bouncy dice!
We had five soft speckled frogs and a real log to practise the popular number song,
Stories were shared involving maths concepts like The Enormous Turnip and Smart Aunties, which is all about different patterns,
Outside we played hopscotch and had seasonal hunts for chicks, eggs and frogs; these involved counting how many were found and working out how many were still missing,
The children decorated Easter baskets using different shapes and created patterns, drawing different shapes and
colours on an egg picture.
In previous weeks, story time featured traditional tales involving numbers one to three: 3 Little Pigs, 3 Billy Goats
Gruff, Goldilocks and the 3 Bears.
On Thursday 7th April we invited a Maths teacher, Mr. Dominic Ashcroft, to spend a morning with us. He held a circle time exploring the concept of “greater than or less than.” The children were invited to count out food for the hungry crocodile onto two chairs, matching the numbers to numerals, then to say which group the crocodile would eat, choosing the largest number of pompoms.
They then sorted the numbers 1-5 into the correct order, thinking about the concepts of one more or one less.