Tag: numeracy

Making Maths Meaningful – How Numbers Shape Our Everyday Lives

Introduction
From shopping and cooking to telling the time and managing money, maths is all around us. It’s not just a subject taught in schools—it’s a life skill that children use every single day. As we celebrate World Maths Day, it’s the perfect time to highlight the importance of numeracy and how we can make learning maths fun, engaging, and relevant for children.

📊 Why Maths Matters

Maths helps children develop:
✅ Logical thinking and problem-solving
✅ Confidence in everyday decisions
✅ Numeracy skills for life—like budgeting, measuring, and timing
✅ A foundation for future learning and careers in science, technology, engineering, and beyond

Understanding how we use maths in real life helps children see it not as something “hard” or “boring,” but as a tool they already use all the time.

🔢 Everyday Ways We Use Maths

🛒 At the shops – Comparing prices, counting money, understanding discounts
🕒 Telling the time – Learning hours, minutes, and daily routines
🍽️ Cooking and baking – Measuring ingredients, setting timers, dividing portions
🎲 Playing games – Taking turns, adding scores, and recognising patterns
🚗 Travelling – Reading timetables, understanding distances, estimating journey times
📦 Tidying and sorting – Categorising toys by size, shape, or colour

The more we point out maths in the real world, the more children connect with it.

🎲 Making Maths Fun for Children

✨ 1. Turn it into a game

  • Board games like Snakes & Ladders and Uno teach counting and number recognition
  • Play shop with coins and price tags
  • Do scavenger hunts with numbers and shapes

🍪 2. Bake Together

  • Baking involves measuring, fractions, and timing—maths you can eat!

🎨 3. Use Art & Crafts

  • Make patterns with shapes, count beads for necklaces, or fold paper into halves and quarters

📱 4. Try Apps & Online Games

  • Use child-friendly maths games and apps to reinforce skills in a fun, interactive way

📚 5. Story Time with Numbers

  • Read counting books or stories that include numbers and maths-based problem-solving

🧠 6. Celebrate World Maths Day!

  • Join activities online or at school
  • Create a “Maths Around Me” challenge
  • Let kids come up with maths questions based on their day

👨‍👩‍👧 How Parents and Caregivers Can Support Maths Learning

  • Praise effort, not just getting the answer right
  • Talk about maths positively—avoid phrases like “I’m not good at maths”
  • Encourage everyday maths moments and include children in decisions like budgeting for groceries
  • Ask open-ended questions like, “How many do we need?” or “What would happen if we used half the amount?”

🧮 Final Thoughts

Maths isn’t just for the classroom—it’s a part of daily life. Helping children see the relevance of numbers builds confidence, sparks curiosity, and gives them a solid foundation for the future.

So this World Maths Day, let’s celebrate the joy of numbers and show children just how much maths matters!

📍 World Maths Day 2025 takes place on Wednesday, 26th March!

World nursery rhyme week

Hands up if you love nursery rhymes? Then World Nursery Rhyme Week, 10th-14th November 2014, is made for you. Sadly 1 in 4 adults in the UK can’t remember a single, whole nursery rhyme, which means lots of children are missing out on fun.

Nursery rhymes are important for children’s development in lots of different ways. Reciting nursery rhymes helps develop memory and cognitive skills, sequencing events, speech and language, and an understanding of the world. The rhythm of speech patterns used in nursery rhymes is ideal for helping children pick up the number of syllables in each word, and words often important sounds and identify those that rhyme.

Many nursery rhymes help with mathematical development because they involve counting forwards (‘one, two, three, four, five once I caught a fish alive) and backwards (ten green bottles….nine green bottles…eight green bottles…) and stretch children’s imagination.

You can use nursery rhymes in many different ways, not just singing! Encourage children to clap along either to the beat or to the rhythm of the syllables, make up actions, paint or do crafts using images and ideas from the rhymes, create a bag or box of props to illustrate rhymes, get finger puppets…the possibilities are endless.

The 5 rhymes for World Nursery Rhyme Week 2022 are:

Oranges and Lemons
Old King Cole
Five Currant Buns
Hey Diddle Diddle
I hear Thunder

What will you do?

Summer maths

School may seem a long way away but you can keep those mathematical skills ticking over and even developing, all while having fun.

Count – forwards, backwards, every which way. Start from different numbers and don’t be tempted to go on from 20 all the way to 100 if you don’t need to. At an early age this means saying a sequence of numbers to 5 or 10 but back that up with counting out concrete objects 1…2…3 and the understanding that ‘3’ relates to the total number of objects as well as what you say when you put the third object down. Bring this in naturally, for example you’re pouring drinks for your charges and their friends – ask them how many they need, get them to count out the glasses, count as you’re pouring the drinks. Count the number of petals on a simple flower or try to count the number of petals on a daisy – are they all the same? Get children used to the idea of estimating by guessing a number before you count the petals. Use mathematical language like the first swing and the second swing. Make collections and count them out, and use the shells or stones or sticks you’ve collected to sort them later.

Continue reading “Summer maths”

5 ways with pom-poms

 

Pom-poms are a great tool for promoting all kinds of development. Here are 5 activities you can do with a muffin tray, a small jar or cup, a pair of tweezers or tongs and a load of pom-poms.

 

Pick them up and drop them. This simple activity for younger children promotes the pincer grip, which is vital for holding a pencil later on. Picking up and dropping the pom-poms promotes hand eye coordination and provides a sensory experience too.

Sort the pom-poms acording to colour. Not only is this promoting fine motor development and hand-eye coordination but it’s also working on matching and colour recognition.

 

Extend the activity by using tweezers. If you put the pom-poms into a narrow necked jar they won’t be able to get their hand in their to pick the pom-poms up so they’ll need to use tongs or tweezers. The pinching motions strengthens the muscles in the hand and the added challenge will develop problem solving abilities.

 

Count. It sounds simple but you have a lot of pom-poms so you can at least count to twenty with all of them, count how many of different colours, work on concepts such as more and fewer, and add up by transferring pom-poms from one part of the tray to another. It’s ideal for explaining tens and units if you have different sized pom-poms. The smaller ones are units and when you put the tenth smaller one in you can exchange 10 small pom-poms for a bigger one. Top tip from a primary maths specialist – always start to count from zero. The quantity ‘one’ doesn’t make sense unless there is nothing there in the first place so make it obvious and associate zero with nothing from the start.

 

Blow them. Pom-poms are light and they roll so get down and blow them in a straight line or round a course you’ve drawn out on paper. As well as encouraging children to fill their lungs this also develops the muscles of the face and jaw which is great for speech development.