This week, the children continued to engage with activities that draw attention to the purpose of counting – to find out ‘how many’ objects there are. The children also revisited the concept of cardinality – that the last number in the count tells us how many things there are ALTOGETHER. They have had lots of opportunities to hear, join in with and develop their knowledge of the counting sequence through our maths activities and play this week.

A key focus has been 'the stable order principle' – rehearsing the order of the first 5 numbers and understanding that the position each number holds in our number sequence does not change. While continuing to work with numbers to 5, the children have been developing their understanding of the ordinal aspect by investigating the difference in value of consecutive whole numbers. They spent time discovering that each number has a value of 1 more than the previous number. Using blocks and squares to order quantities from 1 to 5 helped to embed this key understanding - the children have been referring to this work as 'creating staircase patterns'.

Home Learning Challenge

As part of our starter activities this week we have been playing a game of 'Flashy Fingers' and it would be great if you could play the game together at home too:

* Quickly show a number of fingers on 1 hand (e.g. flash 2 fingers, or 4 fingers). 

* Ask the children to say how many fingers they can see, then ask them to try to copy the number of fingers using their own hands. They may need to 'grow' the number of fingers by counting 1 at a time or they may be able to quickly 'show' the correct amount of fingers depending on their confidence, dexterity and number knowledge.

* Encourage the children to take turns to be the leader in the ‘Flashy Fingers’ game: Parent holds up a number of fingers on 1 hand, while the child says the number of fingers they can see and then holds up the same number of fingers on their own hand, before swapping roles.

This play will support your child's subitising skills. As always, please share any observations, photos and comments from the play via Tapestry. The children really feel proud about sharing their learning from home with the rest of the class.