Growing Mathematicians at Rugby Nursery

Laura Smith, manager of our Rugby nursery explains what Growing Mathematicians is and how it fits into the EYFS.

Growing Mathematicians is about inspiring children to learn early mathematical concepts, which is so much more than just numbers. It incorporates shapes, colours, size, weight and quantities.

At Rugby, we have Growing Mathematicians activities laid out in the preschool room each day to promote children’s overall understanding of maths concepts from an early age. This means our children are able to flourish within the enriching environment that we provide as they learn through their play and their interests.

We support children to leave our nursery ready for their next step to school. They are able to do things such as:

• recognise numbers 1-20
• recognise simple shapes
• categorise objects into shapes
• categorise objects into quantities
• categorise objects and amounts

Some of the ways we do this are:

Learning outdoors

Outdoor number and shape hunts are a brilliant way to combine learning with children’s enjoyment for being outside. It can be a treasure hunt and involve collecting items in the outside areas. We can also encourage children to look at sizes of objects and rank them smallest to largest, or hold items to see which is the heaviest.

Parents can follow this up with activities such as looking for shapes and numbers that they see in the community. For example, when they are in the car, looking at the shapes of road signs or the numbers on the signs.

Incorporate into other activities such as cooking

Our Creative Cooks activities allow us to incorporate mathematical concepts. Children love weighing and measuring, identifying the numbers on scales, counting how many spoons or cups of ingredients are required.

Again these can be followed up with cooking at home, which also supports the ‘Eat better, start better’ programme (Voluntary Food and Drink Guidelines for Early Years Settings).

Tie in with other areas of learning such as science

All children love the volcano experiment! Our children in particular enjoy counting the number of pipettes of liquid it takes for the volcano to explode.

To find out more, please contact your local Bright Horizons nursery, as throughout February our nurseries will be exploring a range of fun activities linked to our unique Growing Mathematicians enhancement. We will be exploring fun and creative ways to develop early mathematical concepts and find out how maths can be found in our everyday surroundings. Discover how your little one will have the opportunity to explore numbers, sequences, shapes and more.