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sarah707
09-12-2014, 07:30 PM
We have been talking about this report on the Independent Childminders Facebook page -

http://www.nationalnumeracy.org.uk/userfiles/Documents/APPG_paper_-_EYs.pdf

... a recent report suggests early years providers are failing children in numeracy teaching and 'Mathematics' should be a prime area of learning ... what do you think?

Do you struggle including maths activities in your planning? Does your negative view of maths impact on your planning as the paper suggests?

What do Forum members think? :D

loocyloo
09-12-2014, 08:09 PM
I don't have a negative attitude to math but I find it the hardest to 'observe' ... we count, we add on and take away, we sort, we make patterns, we do puzzles, we talk about shapes etc ... but it seems a more 'defined' subject than any of the other areas!

SYLVIA
09-12-2014, 09:05 PM
I don't enjoy maths and did find that I didn't purposely do maths activities. However over the last two years 3 children I had here didn't recognise number 1-10 before going to school. Although this made me look at my resources both to use and visual displays, these 3 children didn't respond even from help at their pre schools. I am more aware of maths being included in activities now so at least I feel that I'm doing my best

FloraDora
09-12-2014, 10:23 PM
I agree that more awareness of 'number sense' training is needed.

I can't count how many times I have fed back to surprised parents after an initial assessment when I was a Reception teacher that maths needed to be our focus. They thought that being able to count(chant) meant their LO was 'good ' at maths. When in fact they had little number sense, all they could do was chant words in an order or even recognise numbers visually but had no idea what that means in quantity and couldn't see that 3/4 items were 3/4 without physically counting and then when you ask how many? They start from 1 and count again.
This is where the characteristics of learning, problem solving, is really important.

I always find it amazing that people are prepared to say they struggle with maths, but rarely say they struggle with reading or writing. I taught adult literacy for many years and people hide the fact that they may have poor reading skills but are happy to say they are no good at maths. It's almost acceptable in our society now not to be good at maths.....why??

So I welcome a situation where maths becomes important in our life again and it has to start with a love of it from an early age, so that means it's up to Early Years professionals to create maths learning as exciting and therefore would welcome funding to enable all EY practioners to reach the standard of maths expected like teachers. Even though teachers may have an A in maths at alevel they still have to pass a basic numeracy course before being accepted on a teachers training course. If we are offering ourselves as an alternative nursery education we need to be able to guide children in number sense acquisition and that might mean improving our own maths before embarking on educating LO's.

Maza
09-12-2014, 11:18 PM
I totally agree with FloraDora. I had the same when I was a Reception teacher - surprised parents/kids who could recite number names and recognise the numerals but had very little understanding of number in general. Many had also been made to write rows and rows of numbers. (Mind you, my daughter's reception teacher wasn't much better.) It saddens me because these parents had obviously put a lot of love and effort into teaching their little ones. I think there needs to be a big, HUGE push on mathematical vocabulary and how to maximise its use in everyday life from day 1 with babies. I truly feel that this would prevent many gaps in our knowledge from appearing and really give a firm foundation for mathematics.

FloraDora, excellent point about people readily admitting to being rubbish at Maths etc. It's so true!

mama2three
10-12-2014, 08:14 AM
I get the impression that so many cms are much like the parents flora speaks of , we point out numbers in the environment to help them 'recognise' and we teach them the 1-10 chant. But then although we are actually doing a whole plethora of maths activities with them we don't recognise them as such , don't write observations , don't follow up and help the child keep progressing . Im actually a 'maths lover' ( I know ) but so many of my friends openly say they hate maths , or are no good at it - and so they don't focus on that area. The help is there though , even on the development matters second column ( another reason I stick with this document rather than the outcomes) For the childminders whove been around a while the old psrn 'principles into practice' cards are still a valuable resource We all bake , measure , estimate , put things into groups , play with treasure baskets , explore , ask whether there are enough spoons for everyone! We use mathematical and positional language naturally.
I really like this webpage..
Maths in the revised Early Years Foundation Stage | Learning and Development | Teach Nursery (http://www.teachnursery.com/learning-and-development/view/maths-in-the-revised-early-years-foundation-stage)

Should it be a prime area? Not sure that would make a difference - literacy isn't a prime area but we all read books , talk about them , develop recall and predicton skills etc... Or maybe the fact that we don't have to focus on maths with our under 3s has given those less confident cms a 'get out clause' ...

sing-low
10-12-2014, 09:27 AM
I went to an inspirational workshop on maths in story at my DD's pre-school. By using a story of animals hiding in a box (putting them in one at a time), the storyteller included loads of maths concepts and she hardly used numbers at all. Maybe that's part of the problem? That Maths is just numbers and counting and we don't look beyond that to get a number sense. I agree, the Development Matters columns are particularly helpful here to get a sense of what we are trying to achieve with the children.

The other thing that I picked up from the workshop was that for early years (and possibly also for cms?), maths needs to be 'embedded' i.e. In a familiar context, or it doesn't make sense. So, for example, children learn Maths when there are four biscuits and five children!

sarah707
10-12-2014, 08:45 PM
I think another thing cms struggle with are the amount of things covered by maths - not just counting, shape, space, measure but also time, fractions, weight, distance, speed, positional language, measure, capacity, symmetry and much more...

It can seem like a heck of a lot to plan for and many just avoid it :/

Jiorjiina
12-12-2014, 02:36 PM
I think the problem here is partially that we are so wedded to to idea that arithmetic = mathematics.

Counting, knowing numbers etc is great, but is it not the sum (sorry! ;)) total of mathematics. I think it's partly down to the godawful state of maths teaching in schools over recent years. I don't mean the teachers here, but the actual curriculum that doesn't allow for teaching about wider concepts of mathematics, which is why we find it hard to identify opportunities for expanding activities to include maths.

I hated maths at school. It turns out I have dyscalculia, which doesn't make it easy for me to learn mathematical concepts. But I actually really enjoy introducing mindees to maths, because it means I have to find a way do it that I can understand, which is usually in a practical or activity related way. For example, I love baking with mindees. Which is great, because it covers a ton of mathematical concepts and you get food at the end! So when we made a victoria sponge cake, we weighted out the ingredients (so we covered balance, weight, measure and volume), we cooked it for a set amount of time (time, obv!), then we cut it in half to put jam and cream in the middle, and divided it up into enough slices for everyone to take home a piece for each person in their family (fractions).

The oldest mindees I look after at the moment are just 3. We have recently been looking at numeral prefixes (bi-, tri-, etc) because we are now in dinosaur mode, so we started with Triceratops and then talked about other words that sound the same, like tricycle and triangle. And we talked about unicorns, bicycles and binoculars and so on. Which is as much literacy as it is maths.

Earlier this year, I introduced my mindees to Thunderbirds (a decision I somewhat regret, because of reasons!). They can now count backwards from 5 quite happily, and they understand the concept around it because when I try and throw them off by adding other numbers in they tell me off and tell me how to do it properly. It's also great for helping them to understand numbers as individual things, and mixing and matching ("Thunderbird 4 is inside Thunderbird 2's pod", "you can't take pictures of Thunderbird 1", "Thunderbird 3 goes out into space", etc)

I went to a talk by some primary school maths teachers, and they said that some children go to school not even knowing something as obvious as ordinal numbers (first, second, third, etc). It's such a simple thing to teach as well, because any sequencing activity can be expanded to introduce it. Now I try and make sure that every time I talk about something in a sequence, like our plans for the day, I try and use ordinal numbers so they know that first we do this, second we do this, third we're going to do this and so on. That was all it took.