At snack time this morning, somebody counted out the cups, worked out there weren’t enough, and fetched two more. In the garden, somebody else argued about whose sunflower is tallest, and the water tray hosted a long investigation into which jug fills the bucket faster. That’s three maths lessons before lunch, and nobody wrote a plan for any of them.
Here’s the thing we’d say to any practitioner who claims they’re “not a maths person”: you’re teaching it all day. The question is only whether you notice.
Where the confidence gap comes from
Plenty of skilled practitioners feel wobbly about maths, and it usually has nothing to do with their ability. It’s an echo of their own schooling, red pen and right answers and that cold moment at the whiteboard. So maths gets quietly delegated to the confident colleague, or shrunk to counting to ten at register time.
The shame of it is that early maths is one of the strongest foundations we can give children for later learning, and the EYFS asks for far more than reciting numbers. The genuinely useful bits are ideas with unfamiliar names and very familiar faces. Subitising: seeing three raisins and knowing it’s three without counting. Cardinality: understanding that the last number you say when counting is how many there are. The counting principles: one number per object, in a stable order, and it doesn’t matter whether you count the teddies left to right or right to left.
Watch a two-year-old solemnly tapping each stair as they count and you’re watching those principles under construction. They’ll get it wrong for months, skipping numbers, counting the same teddy twice, and the errors are the interesting part, because each one tells you exactly which principle is still being built.
Maths lives in the routine, not the maths table
Shape, space, measure and pattern are everywhere children play. Block play is geometry with sound effects. The obstacle course is position and direction: over, under, through, behind. Tidy-up time is sorting and classifying. Setting the lunch table is one-to-one correspondence with cutlery. A summer’s afternoon with ice cubes melting on the patio is measurement, time and change, all in one puddle.
What turns those moments into learning is the adult, and mostly the adult’s talk. Mathematical language, dropped in naturally: more than, fewer, heavier, the same as, next to, twice. Genuine questions rather than testing ones. “How do you know?” does more for a child’s mathematical thinking than “what number is this?” ever will, because it asks them to reason rather than perform.
If you’d like to build that confidence properly, our Early Mathematics in the EYFS course was designed for exactly this: what the EYFS requires, number sense, shape and pattern, and how to weave maths through play, routines and quality interactions without a worksheet in sight.
Assessment is watching, not testing
You don’t need a clipboard quiz to know where a child’s maths is. Watch them share out the play dough, build a symmetrical tower, or howl because their biscuit is smaller than their neighbour’s (a keen grasp of comparison, that). The evidence is in the play, and the skill is recognising it and offering the next nudge: a bigger jug, a trickier pattern, a question that stretches.
Extending thinking can be as simple as being wrong on purpose. Count the plates and miss one out, and watch the delighted correction. Children who catch an adult’s mistake are doing the most secure kind of knowing there is.
Feel as confident with maths as you do with stories
The course covers number sense, shape, space and pattern, mathematical talk and assessing children’s thinking through play, and finishes with an NFAQ-accredited certificate.
Tomorrow’s snack time will serve up the same lesson again: cups, children, and the gap between the two. All that changes with training is that you’ll see it coming, and know exactly what to say next.