Go on - offer to do a staff input on early years maths!
You know you want to!
It is important for colleagues to understand early years – and by that I also mean early KS1, and this blog is aimed at suggesting some discussion points for that staff meeting slot.
Firstly, a little background.
In July 2021, as schools returned to ‘normal’ after various Covid lockdowns, I wrote this blog https://info125328.wixsite.com/website/post/reception-and-y1-what-shall-we-do-from-september-2021 based on support I was asked to give to Reception and Y1 teachers as the schools returned after a huge period of disruption and, for many, stress, anxiety and sadness.
Now, two years on, in September 2023, I wondered if anything of what I saw as important for Reception and Y1 children at that time would seem relevant now. What follows are my thoughts about our young children’s mathematics on returning to school, in any September.
I began that blog with the importance for me of considering children’s mathematical well-being for future learning.
In other words:
· building young children’s confidence,
· their willingness to have a go,
· their mathematical self-esteem and enjoyment; and
· establishing firm relationships between the adults in school and families.
For me, these four bullet points are what matters most, in any year, at any time.
But what might these mean, practically?
First and foremost, all children need both choice and agency when working mathematically. If we want to create confident, genuinely interested mathematicians, our mathematics interactions cannot not be simply about delivering material (or knowledge) and completing adult-controlled tasks. Instead, we need to build in opportunities for decision-making in every mathematical interaction. This is supported by research. In 2022 Skene and her colleagues published a systematic review and meta-analysis of research published between 1977 and 2020, comparing evidence of guided play to direct instruction or free play, in supporting children between the ages of 1- and 8-years' learning and development. They define play as a spectrum, with “varying degrees of child autonomy and adult guidance” (Skene et al, 2022:19), with ‘guided play’ as positioned as a middle ground and (unsurprisingly for me) the ‘sweet spot’ in terms of children’s learning:
“Guided play has been situated as a “middle- ground” between free play and direct instruction. The intersection of play and guidance is believed to offer a powerful vehicle for early learning, harnessing the motivation and exploration that children benefit from during free play, and a Vygotskian- inspired recognition that children's learning and development can be extended when effectively supported or “guided” by an experienced partner.” (Skene et al, 2022:19)
Crucially, to be effective, guided play has three fundamental characteristics.:
• the adult is clear about what is to be learned, with a learning goal in mind
• the adult is flexible with their guidance
– providing sensitive hints/prompts,
– asking open-ended questions,
– setting a challenge,
– guiding a child's attention by modeling,
– joining in the play [co-play],
– and/or adapting to the individual needs, interests, and understanding of the child (scaffolding)
and here it is:
• children should have choice and agency – whoever initiates the task – there are opportunities for this to be child led.
By ensuring we design our maths tasks to include child agency, the chance for the child to have an idea of what they might like to try; “What do you notice?” “What (numbers) would you like to try now/next?”, not only are we building young children’s confidence, their willingness to have a go and their mathematical self-esteem and enjoyment; but we are giving ourselves ideal assessment opportunities – Do they use what we are working on / what I am teaching? What is surprising me?
The Characteristics of Effective Teaching and Learning (DfE, 2023) https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1170108/EYFS_framework_from_September_2023.pdf
In the 2021 blog I discuss the central importance of the three ‘Characteristics of Effective Teaching and Learning’ (I do like things that come in threes) for children’s mathematics education, because these lie at the very heart of supporting the development of our children’s problem solving and reasoning. These are:
· playing and exploring (engagement)
· active learning (motivation)
and
· creating and thinking critically.
Here they are in a table and expanded to illustrate their mathematical potential (I apologise for not remembering the original source for this):
Looking at the right-hand side, this is an ideal way to check that the mathematics we offer our children, over time, includes these elements. For example, if we don’t invite children to have their own ideas (see above, on agency), then they will stop thinking these are important in mathematics.
I might ask, what about Y1? Y2? Are these characteristics we would want all of our mathematicians to exhibit? Why stop at the end of Reception? Problem solving and reasoning are one of the three aims of the National Curriculum (DfE 2021), and emphasis on these Characteristics in our maths sessions, particularly Creating and thinking critically, will help support the development of children’s mathematical reasoning over time.
Small steps – why not
If we have children’s well-being at the heart of what we do, it is not about making every lesson a series of very small steps of learning, a step-by-step journey which we all travel together, because we cannot (and must not) assume that simply by laying out the content in this way, that different children’s understanding progresses at the same rate and along the same ‘linear’ path.
It doesn’t.
On the contrary, any linear progression is for the adults’ understanding, rather than for the children to be ‘put through’. It is for the adults to get to grips with the broad direction of development in a particular area, in order to best support their children’s learning over time. This is the, ‘the adult is clear about what is to be learned, with a learning goal in mind’ of guided play. It does not mean children are all led down the same path (mathematical learning is more of a web than a line), it does mean that we, as adults, have these important ‘gates’ in mind for children to pass through, whatever journey they take through the garden.
The comprehensive (and free) US Learning Trajectories website is a good example of an adult resource which is both developmentally sound and research based: https://www.learningtrajectories.org
My original blog went on to discuss other areas, such as curriculum breadth, and I am going to tie up this one with the 4th bullet I began with in relation to building children’s mathematical well-being for future learning:
· establishing firm relationships between the adults in school and families.
What might this look like? One way researched by my colleagues in the Early Childhood Mathematics Group https://earlymaths.org is to use a focus on spatial work to hold discussions with family members about what mathematics is and how we teach this. (There is a whole area of our website dedicated to the development of children’s spatial reasoning here: https://earlymaths.org/spatial-reasoning/ )
Teachers and practitioners have re-discovered the mathematical importance of many of the opportunities we might already provide in our settings and classrooms, eg: jigsaws, blocks, map work, etc (Bates et al 2023). And these seem to be ideal ways in for families to support their children mathematically without causing anxiety, or re-surfacing old, possibly negative, attitudes to mathematics. On the contrary, families have enjoyed getting stuck in with their children’s spatial work as it has many links to what they might do outside schools and settings (footnote 1).
How about starting a jigsaw club?
In the summer of 2021, I could see we had a huge opportunity to change the way we do things and to re-think the mathematical priorities for our young learners.
Have we seized that opportunity? I am sure some have, but still I see many colleagues tied to schemes and worried about ‘getting through’ all the material (who is the curriculum actually for?), and young children with very little appreciation that mathematics has anything to do with them, but rather as something delivered to them.
I would like this blog to be used to focus discussions with KS1 colleagues, mathematics leads, SLT and head teachers to support decision-making regarding mathematics provision. This means discussions about how to best to support all children mathematically, and, for example, each year group to take forward the positives from the previous year group, rather than the ‘should be able tos’ of other way around.
A few questions to consider might be:
· Which mathematical teaching experiences have been successful in Reception and that we can repeat and build on in Y1? In Y2? For example: how are our taught mathematical experiences in Reception successfully moved into and emerge out of continuous provision (footnote 2)?
· What were the particular features of these successful episodes?
· How might we best extend and deepen these experiences over time in Reception, and then during Y1 and Y2?
· How can we continue to use continuous provision in Y1 and Y2 to build our children’s mathematical independence and to cement and deepen their understanding?
· How can we continue an emphasis on the Characteristics of Effective Teaching and Learning through Reception and throughout Y1 and into Y2 (and beyond)?
Enjoy all those small mathematical moments with your children this term.
Images:
Maeve Birdsall, Simon Gregg, Helen J Williams, Early Childhood Mathematics Group
References
Many of the ideas in this blog, as well as others, are explored in my book published by Sage in March 2022, “Playful Mathematics for Children 3 to 7” (Nursery World professional book of the year, 2022). Available from many booksellers: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/9781529755152?gC=5a105e8b&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIpvKMtPCTgQMVjsPtCh1RhAWPEAQYAyABEgKAvvD_BwE
Bates, K.E., Williams, A.Y., Gilligan-Lee, K.A., Gripton, C., Lancaster, A., Williams, H.J., Borthwick, A., Gifford, S. and Farran, E.K. (2023). Practitioners' perspectives on spatial reasoning in educational practice from birth to 7 years. Br J Educ Psychol 93 (2): 571-590
DfE (2021). National Curriculum in England: Mathematics programmes of study.
DfE (2023). Statutory framework for the early years foundation stage. Setting the standards for learning, development and care for children from birth to five.https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1170108/EYFS_framework_from_September_2023.pdf
Skene, K., O’Farrelly, C., M., Byrne, E. M., Kirby, N., Stevens, E. C., & Ramchandani, P. G. (2022). Can guidance during play enhance children’s learning and development in educational contexts? A systematic review and meta-analysis. Child Development 00, 1–19 https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cdev.13730
Footnotes
1 The Early Childhood Mathematics Group https://earlymaths.org has produced a set of (free) posters and keyrings to support families’ understanding of spatial mathematics: https://earlymaths.org/spatial-reasoning-toolkit-posters/
2 The Early Childhood Mathematics Group https://earlymaths.org has produced a set of (free) posters to support the use of continuous provision for mathematics in Years 1 &2 here: https://earlymaths.org/continuous-provision/
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