Michelle, a childminder in Morecombe, explains how after attending two training sessions organised by her local Early Years Stronger Practice Hub, she used the ideas she learnt there to expand play with numbers and beach play with the children in her setting. A question about a child’s shoe size sparked off a whole sequence of related maths-based activities.
Maths and number activities
After attending various training sessions on maths and number, arranged by the local Stronger Practice Hub, we have been doing lots of play with numbers. Before now, I would wait until children were older to introduce maths play and maths talk, but now everyone is getting involved.
A recent child-led example was a three-year-old thinking her shoe size was a three because she is aged three. So, we looked at all the children attending and lined up their shoes in size order. There was lots of talk about bigger and smaller.
Then we looked in her shoe to see her size, and then we looked in the other children’s shoes to see their sizes, so lots of number conversations. From this, we painted pictures of their feet and after cutting them out, we put in them in size order.
We also went to a shoe shop to look at, and try, on different shoes. We looked in the shop to find shoes in the children’s sizes. This was child-led and was a wonderful number led experience, with all children of all ages involved. We have our beautiful number resources (which we were given at the training) out all the time.
Beach activities
After attending beach training, we are now going to the beach with more of a purpose. Previously, we used to go to the sandy beach to build sandcastles and jump in the sand. After the training, I gained confidence to try other areas of the beach, not just the sandy area, as there are more things to explore.
We now go to all different parts of the beach; we have a range of amazing beach resources that we take with us. These were given out free at the course we attended. We now go where there are more things to see in the sea, we take photos, and if we don’t know what things are, we will look them up later on the computer.
We talked about the rubbish on the beach, and what we should do with rubbish to protect our world. We have fabulous conversations about what we can see hear, touch and smell. We will continue and expand this over the different seasons so all the children can enjoy what’s on our doorstep. Before, it was just sunny days on the sandy part of the beach, and now after the training, we can appreciate how much of an amazing learning experience this is for all my children of any age.
November 2024