‘All you need is love’ sang The Beatles, and studies have shown that what makes the biggest difference to children in their early years is knowing an adult who shows they care. There is no other resource that is more valuable to children than a loving adult.
Just like any other skill, learning to identify and express emotions is a vital part of healthy social and emotional development in children. That is why it is important to teach and encourage our children how to identify and cope with big emotions.
Developing number sense in young children focuses on three skill strands: counting, comparison, and composition (Griffiths, Gifford and Back, 2016). The Domino 10-Frame Tray helps to support early counting and comparison, with its unique and easily recognisable pattern helping children to develop subitising skills.
Tried-and-tested inspiration from a Reception class teacher using Number Pebbles, with pre-schoolers through to KS1:
We asked you to share science experiments and investigative play activities that your children have loved doing. There were so many brilliant suggestions that we thought it would be helpful to collate some of them to inspire other practitioners and parents.
A child has mastered counting to ten when they have a deep understanding of the numbers to ten. It takes time to develop depth of understanding and it is important that children are provided with the time and resources to explore and enjoy number.
This range of multisensory resources offer engaging ways to support and encourage pre-reading skills. Children will want to get hands-on with letters and their sounds as they explore these tactile resources, interactive apps.
This range of maths resources has been selected with parents in mind, as they play and learn at home with their children. They all work well for one-to-one learning and are designed to be taken outdoors too!
Self-regulation is the means by which we control our responses to a situation. It involves understanding our emotions and developing strategies to manage them. It also incorporates being able to think a problem through and plan how to approach it.
Lorraine George, author of Growing Together: 50 inspiring ideas for intergenerational learning, chooses resources from Yellow Door that bring the elderly and the young together.