This week at Nursery, we have been really developing our number sense by focusing on showing numbers on fingers to 5 and counting 5 objects by tapping our finger or moving them to make sure we are accurate. We also begun to match numeral to quantity during play experiences.

We enjoyed working together to complete the number doors jigsaw puzzle this week. We had to match the number of animals to the doors to complete the puzzle. We counted the animals to check that the pieces were in the right place.

We all enjoyed playing with our ACE Ice-creams invitation in our maths area this week. We focused on making ice-cream sundaes containing 5 scoops of ice-cream. This required spooning each ice-cream scoop into the bowl as we counted carefully. We used wooden 5 frames to check our accuracy, as we noticed how the flavour combinations represented different ways to compose 5. We applied our mark-making skills to draw our ice-cream recipes to explore using marks to represent number and 5 frames to show that our sundaes did indeed have 5 scoops as planned. Many of us revisited this activity across the week, showing a great interest in ‘real-life’ problem-solving!

Number rhymes are a fantastic way to deepen our understanding of numbers to 5. We focused on the rhymes 5 speckled frogs and 5 little ducks. We used toys to act out the rhymes, moving them to see how the quantities changed. We enjoyed whole-group singing where we acted out the rhymes ourselves to demonstrate our understanding, using our fingers to represent the numbers too.

Maths is everywhere and we have enjoyed developing our sense of number in so many ways this week at Nursery. You could continue to practise this at home as family by singing number rhymes together, creating a dance routine with 5 of each action (5 claps, 5 jumps, 5 wiggles) or by counting out toys. Look around you when indoors and out, do you notice any numerals to 5?