Raya and Olive are pretending to make cakes with playdough. Two friends come to join them, and they decide to have a birthday party. Olive fetches a jar of gems to use as decorations for their cakes.
“I wonder if there will enough for everyone to have some,” ponders Raya.
“There are lots of gems, I think there are twenty gems,” says Olive.
“I think there are thirty gems,” replies Raya. The girls tip out the gems, share them out and count they have ten gems each.
In this vignette, taken from the forthcoming ‘Early Mathematics’ section of the EEF’s ‘Early Years Evidence Store’, Raya and Olive are exploring the concepts of number and operations. Through their play, the children link together number words and quantities, and use counting to share and group objects in a context that is interesting and meaningful to them.
Making mathematical moments count: Maximising opportunities for learning maths throughout the day
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