Teaching and Learning 

As your child's first teacher, you play a vital role in your child's  learning confidence in mathematics. 

Developing numeracy skills early in life gives children an important foundation for learning and development. 

Numeracy skills help prepare a child for daily life, including problem-solving and working with money. 

You can bring maths into your child’s everyday life by:

Listening and singing together

Songs and rhymes that repeat counting words introduce children to maths in a fun and engaging way, e.g. Five Little Ducks, Monkeys on the Bed or Ten Green Bottles. 

Playing with shapes

Jigsaw puzzles and drawing shapes teach your child problem-solving and spatial awareness. Encourage your child to identify shapes in their everyday world, e.g. round ball, square window, hexagonal stop sign.

Making patterns

Make patterns using pebbles, pegs or pieces of coloured paper.

Cooking with your child

Cooking provides opportunities to count and measure. Ask your child to count the eggs, measure the milk and flour and talk about the temperature that the oven needs to be set at.  

Making collections

Collect objects from the outdoors such as stones, leaves and twigs. Sort them, measure them and count them. 

Shopping

Collect food and grocery items and label them with prices written on sticky notes or prices cut out of shopping catalogues.

• Talk about how we pay for items, using notes and coins and make paper money to use to buy the items. You could even make a shop together. 
• As you pack away grocery items, arrange them by:  height (tallest to the shortest), cost (least expensive to most expensive), or by weight (heaviest to lightest).

Measuring

Explore ways of measuring using sticks, footprints or hand lengths.

Measure the height of people in your family, comparing who is the tallest to the shortest.

Provide different sized cups in the bath tub to fill and empty. Talk about how many little cups of water to fill the big cup. 

Counting

Use different numbers as the starting point for practising counting, e.g. starting from 6 or 10. Ask your child to count forwards and backwards. 

Calendar 

Keeping a calendar not only supports organisation, but also familiarises your child with days and dates, counting forwards and backwards as well as numbers. Regular reference to a calendar support all of these skills.