Category Archives: Numeracy

Gross Motor and Fine Motor Maths Fun:

July 24, 2020Gross Motor and Fine Motor, Numeracy, Online Curriculum - Maths Weekadmin

Maths Concepts: Counting, number recognition, sorting, colour recognition, one-to-one correspondence and number formation.

Activities that allow a child to learn with the whole body are essential in preschool! Here’s a wonderful gross motor game that will help with counting, number identification, and can be turned into a sorting game and also work on fine-motor skills and number formation.

All children are different, but your child should start to be able to identify the symbols of most numbers from 1-10 between the ages of 3 and 4 years and will often identify their own age number even earlier than this.

Directions:

Step 1 – Draw big numbers along your driveway with chalk.

Step 2 – Invite your child to play the number game either by jumping on the number you call out, or if they are not so familiar with numbers you can ask them to jump on any number and then you can call out, “You jumped on number 8”. Kamali enjoyed counting as she jumped from 1 to 2 to 3 etc and then played the game backwards from 10 to 9 to 8 etc (see video below)

Step 3 – Once you’ve had fun number jumping you can turn it into a sorting and colour recognition game by getting your child to find 3 red things to put on 3, 2 blue things to put on blue, etc. This activity is important in helping with the understanding that a specific number is a symbol and that symbol stands for a set of specific items. Here your child will also be working on one-to-one correspondence as they count each object to make up the correct number for each symbol.

Step 4 – These numbers are also perfect to work on some fine-motor and number formation skills. Give your child some water and a thick paintbrush or sponge and invite them to play the “number disappearing game” by painting over the numbers with water to make them disappear.

Exploring Maths – Winter Theme

July 15, 2020Numeracy, Winter @Home Curriculumadmin

Next week we are going to delve deeper into the 3rd “R” “Arithmetic” and share with you some of the Math foundations we are working on. For this week let’s have some Winter Maths fun with this Number Matching Mitten print out:

Mitten Match PDF

Directions: Cut out each mittens and invite your child to match the mittens with the corresponding number of snowflakes.

Benefits include: Developing visual discrimination, number recognition, counting, matching skills and one-to-one correspondence

Early Maths and fine motor work: Sorting Colours

June 10, 2020Gross Motor and Fine Motor, Numeracy, Online Curriculum Week 10admin

Did you know….sorting is an important foundational maths skill? Whist sorting may seem a simple enough concept it can take a while for young children to fully grasp this skill.

For this activity you will need:

Coloured containers to sort into. We made slits in the lids so that we could add an extra fine-motor element here, but depending on what kind of colour objects you are sorting, you may prefer open containers.

Use any small coloured objects such as pompoms, buttons, crayons, lego, etc for your child to sort.

You can also use tongs or tweezers to sort with, which adds another wonderful fine-motor element.

After sorting the colours into the boxes, Kamali decided to make rows and counted them to see which colour had the most – developing one-to-one correspondence and quantity comparisons. She has also started to actively explore the concept of addition as seen in the video below.

Then she piled them into their coloured piles on top of the lids, slotted them back into their boxes and then played a trick by sorting the colours into different colour boxes and asking us to guess which colour was inside…..needless to say this activity has many ways to explore and develop early maths skills!

If your child is under 3 you can use bigger containers such as buckets and larger objects to sort such as balls or bean bags.

Early Maths: Measuring our Hippos and other things:

June 4, 2020Numeracy, Online Curriculum Week 9admin

This week we are introducing another important early maths concept – measurement.

Learning about sizes and how to measure and compare different objects is a wonderful early maths activity. Introduce language like big and small, tall and short, wide and narrow.

Whist measuring is usually done with a ruler or tape measure. It is also important to introduce other non-standard units of measurement. Like blocks, beads, pompoms or counters.
This is wonderful counting practice too.

Have some fun measuring at home this week! How many blocks tall is your couch? What about the chair leg?

We have also created this hippo measurement printable for you to work on some measuring skills:

WWHP – Hippo Early Maths Measuring PDF

Early Maths: Egg Counting Activity

May 27, 2020Numeracy, Online Curriculum Week 8admin

Counting, recognising numbers and one-to-one correspondence are all important skills needed for maths readiness.

For younger children having fun reciting numbers aloud through songs and play is the best way to start laying the foundation for maths readiness.

For older children, this week, we have created a fun printable for matching the number of eggs in a nest to the corresponding numeral.

Egg Counting Worksheet PDF – Early Maths Activity

Directions:

Print out the nests and birds from the printable provided for you on the resource page.
Cut out the birds and the nests and show your child how to count how many eggs are in each nest with one touch (one-to-one correspondence).

Show your child how to match the correct numbered bird with the correct nest (number recognition).

For older children you can see if they can figure out the object of the game on their own by saying, “I see birds with numbers on them and I see nests with different amounts of eggs in them…I wonder how we are supposed to play this game?”

3D Art, early Maths and fine motor work – Five Little Speckled Frogs:

May 19, 2020Arts and Crafts, Numeracy, Online Curriculum Week 7admin

Five little speckled frogs sat on a speckled log
Eating the most delicious bugs — YUM YUM!
One jumped into the pool, where it was nice and cool
Then there were four green, speckled frogs.
Ribbit! Ribbit!

Did you know…..? Counting rhymes like this one help to develop a solid foundation in early maths skills such as counting, addition, subtraction and one-to-one correspondence skills which involve counting each object in a set only once, with one touch per object.

When children have opportunities to touch and manipulate objects as they learn, they will create meaningful connections in their brains that stick…Let’s have some hands on learning fun by creating some of our own speckled frogs. Manipulating dough is also absolutely wonderful for working all the muscles in your child’s hands and fingers important for writing skills later on.

Materials needed:

1 Cup Plain Flour
½ Cup Salt
2 Teaspoons Cream of Tartar
1 Tablespoon Oil
1 Cup warm water
2 Tablespoons Green Food Colouring
¼ Cup red lentils

1.Pour all dry ingredients, flour, salt and cream of tartar together in a saucepan.
2.Add water, oil and food colouring to dry ingredients.
3.Whisk before heating to remove any lumps.
4.Cook over medium heat, constantly stirring until it becomes a thick blob.
5.Then turn out onto a clean surface and knead into a smooth ball. Be careful the play dough will be very hot! Use a little bit of flour if the play dough is sticky.
6.When the play dough has cooled, gradually fold and knead in the yellow split peas/lentils
7.Store in a plastic zip lock bag or air tight container.

Now create your scene. We painted a brown paper towel roll as our log and we used the blue fishy painting from our week 4 curriculum as our pond!

Mold your frogs into little balls and even add googly eyes if you have some!
Have fun playing, singing and counting with your child as you explore together.

Early Maths: How much does an elephant weigh?

May 13, 2020Numeracy, Online Curriculum Week 6admin

Did you know an African elephant can weigh between 2000 to 6000kgs…making them the largest land animals.

Here is a fun experiment you can do with your whole family:

Weigh each member of your family and calculate your total weight…can you work out how many of your family’s total weight would make up the same weight as one elephant?

Or alternatively how many of your child’s weight would make up the same weight as one elephant?

We worked out that it would take 133 Kamalis to make up a 2000kg elephant 400 Kamalis to make up the weight of one 6000kg elephant!!!

Early Maths: Sorting, matching and numeracy worksheets

May 6, 2020Numeracy, Online Curriculum Week 5admin

Watering Whole @Home Curriculum Week 5

Please download the the ocean themed worksheets below:

WWHP OCEAN ADVENTURE PAIRING ACTIVITY WORKSHEET

WWHP OCEAN ADVENTURE SHADOW MATCHING ACTIVITY

WWHP OCEAN ADVENTURE ACTIVITY WORKSHEET

Numeracy: Sorting, matching and counting using our 3 primary colours.

April 29, 2020Foundational Concepts, Numeracy, Online Curriculum Week 4admin

Watering Whole @Home Curriculum Week 4

Sorting, matching and counting activities are important for early cognitive development. It helps your child to notice differences and similarities between different objects and develops early literacy and numeracy skills.

In this activity we will sort our 3 primary coloured Chameleons using the printable below:

Chameleon colour matching and sorting printout

Instructions: