Maths at The Wigwam

You’ll know from our previous posts that we LOVE books and reading at the Wigwam. But, we also have so much fun using maths. Maths is everywhere at the Wigwam and we noticed that it’s World Maths Day on 14th March 2019.

World Maths Day is an online celebration of maths, hosted on the online tool Mathletics. Now, we won’t be spending the day on electronics, but it’s a good time to talk about how we use maths every day. From our Tiny Turtles up to the Dancing Deers, maths really is everywhere!

At The Wigwam, we make sure that all children enjoy play experiences that develop their mathematical understanding.

“How children learn about numbers and develop mathematical understanding during the pre-school years is vitally important and sets them on a path towards numeracy skills and confidence in later life”. Maths in The Early Years – All Parliamentary Group for Maths and Numeracy, 2015.  

With our Tiny Turtles, we use vocabulary such as big/small, lots, more, one..two…three. Using this language early on helps them as they need to hear words many times before they can use the words themselves. When they move up to the Scampering Squirrels, we start to introduce words such as count, more than, first and second. We also talk about how things are the same or different and explore whether things are full or empty.

This language continues to develop in the Dancing Deers, with our Wigwam pre-schoolers using numbers up to 20 and even 100! They start to develop an understanding of adding and taking away, and can tell us if something happened once or twice.

Maths at The Wigwam

Some of the many, many simple activities that we do at The Wigwam to encourage mathematical understanding include:

Where’s the teddy? This simple activity helps young babies develop an awareness of number. It’s super easy to do! While playing with a baby, a practitioner will choose three favourite objects and blanket. All three items, such as teddy bears, will then go under the blanket. The practitioner will then take just one of them out and show the baby. Finally, all three objects will be taken out. Using language such as “where have the teddy bears gone?” and “here is one teddy” develops a sensitivity to noticing differences in number and allows them to hear the numbers one, two and three.

For our older toddlers at The Wigwam, we love to explore emptying and filling. We use many different resources, from sand to water, natural resources and toys and games. You’ll often find us gathering lots of different containers, bowls and jugs, adding a bowl of water and allow the children to explore pouring and filling. We use lots of great maths words like “pour” “empty” “full”. So easy!

In our Dancing Deers, we like to explore numbers and finding numbers in our environment. We might talk about the number three and then the children will show us lots of examples of things that are in groups of 3, or tell us that there are  3 people in their home. On our trips out, we get to see the number 3 on buses and doors!

If you would like to find out more about how we encourage maths, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Thu 14th Mar