How would you feel if your child struggled with numeracy and mathematics? What would you do if you felt they were not progressing as well as you'd hoped?
Our job in the Early Years is to enable children to develop to their potential. This involves learning how each child is doing, identifying how we can help them progress and implementing teaching strategies effectively.
For Early Years Practitioners, under pressure to ensure each child reaches the “expected” level for their ages, it can sometimes feel impossible to find a way to get them there. Certainly, children all develop at different rates and will be ready to move forward when they are ready.
Through training and experience of working with many children over many years, our Early Years Practitioners will leave no stone unturned to identify causes of delays in a child's development.
Returning to the question of numeracy, one obstacle to progression could be linked to under development executive function. Researchers from Oxford University, in partnership with Sheffield University and the Department for Education have established evidence that if children can be encouraged to develop their thinking and problem-solving skills then they will be better equipped for numeracy and mathematics.
Fortunately, under the auspices of The ONE Programme, a set of mathematics resources have been developed to encourage executive function in the Early Years and the Nursery has been able to participate in the latest research to evaluate the impact. As part of the project pre-school children were pre-assessed and will be reassessed after 12 weeks to identify the impact of the project on the children's development.
The ONE Programme consists of professional development for practitioners to run fun, short, play-based activities designed to support children's early thinking and numeracy skills. The activities are delivered with activity cards and some low-cost resources to be used with the activities. The activity cards describe maths activities and highlight how to gradually increase executive function demands within maths learning.
Whatever, the results show, our Early Years Practitioners have really benefited from being involved and have learnt a range of ways of incorporating thinking skills into their teaching to make mathematics more accessible, fun, challenging and stimulating for early years children.