Growing Mathematicians at Rugby Nursery
Laura Smith, manager of our Rugby Day Nursery & Preschool in Rugby 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.
If you enjoyed this article and found it to be useful, you can check out more of our early childcare resources in our Family Resource Zone!
And, if you’re not yet a Bright Horizons parent, but are interested in what our nurseries can offer your child on their exciting educational journey, book a personal tour at your local nursery today!
