Our Maths activities this week focused on developing the innate skill of comparing quantities; children were encouraged to look carefully and use the language of comparison to describe sets of objects that they could see. Language is a key focus and adults modelled the language of ‘more than’ and ‘fewer than’ to describe how many objects there are in each set. ‘Fewer than’ is used rather than ‘less than’ because the focus is on countable things. The children were very confident with 'more than' and used this accurately but they found it more challenging to use 'fewer than' as this language is less familiar to them.

Home Challenge

I'm sure many of you will find yourselves with a great big collection of sweets this week following Halloween parties and trick or treating so lets use some of those sweets to practise Maths! Alternatively you could go for an Autumn walk and collect leaves, sticks, conkers, or acorns to use as counting objects.

Write numbers 1-10 or 1-5 (depending on your child's confidence & ability with numbers) on small pieces of paper or post-its and fold them so that you can't see the number. Put the folded papers into a pan or bowl or gift bag and take turns to pick a number out. Each player counts out the matching number of sweets. Encourage your child to compare the 2 amounts then use the stem sentence "______ has fewer sweets than ______" to describe the quantities. Eg, I have fewer sweets than Mummy.