The comparison of quantities is something that children begin to do as babies. When comparing, children notice attributes and begin to understand similarities and differences. This week’s activities focused on further developing these innate skills. The children were encouraged to compare the number of objects in 2 sets by matching them 1:1. Seeing that objects in some sets can be matched without any being left over draws the children’s attention to instances when the quantities of objects are equal.

Language has been a key focus and adults have been reinforcing the language of ‘more than’, ‘fewer than’ and ‘an equal number’ to describe how many objects there are in each set. As the focus this week was on countable things, ‘fewer than’ was used rather than ‘less than’ and ‘more than’ was used rather than ‘greater than’.

Home Learning Challenge: Teddy Bears' Picnic

At home this week, you could continue practising the comparison of quantities by playing with soft toys and creating a Teddy Bears' Picnic scenario. Choose 3 or 4 soft toys to have a 'picnic' then collect a number of objects that they will need for the picnic (plates, cups, cutlery, fruit etc) For some of these items provide the correct amount for the children to give to the toys using 1:1 correspondence but for others provide more or less items, for example have 3 forks and 3 spoons but 4 knives, 5 plates and only 2 cups and maybe 7 pieces of fruit. Explore with your child how to share out the resources so that the bears have an equal amount. We would love to see any photos of this play with comments about how the children managed the task on Tapestry and we will share these in class.