In Reception, we use White Rose Maths and other resources to support maths mastery and the children's early maths skills.

The key activities and skills we have worked on in the first term are:

• Counting Songs to practise counting forwards and backwards within 5 - The nursery rhymes we have focused on are 1,2,3,4,5 Once I Caught a Fish Alive, One Big Hippo Balancing, 5 Little Speckled Frogs, 5 Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed, Hickory, Dickory Dock.

BBC Counting Songs

• Showing and identifying finger numbers to 3

• Subitising 1, 2 and 3 objects - being able to say how many objects there are without counting. We use a range of objects and ask the children, 'What do you see?' and 'How do you see it?'

• Pattern - We learnt about repeating patterns. We joined in with tongue twisters such as 'Red Lorry, Yellow Lorry', circle games like 'In and Out the Dusty Bluebells' and even made up our own ABABAB repeating patterns. One of our books We're Going on a Bear Hunt has fantastic examples of repeating patterns.
  
  We challenged the children to extend their thinking by asking them to spot mistakes and suggest ways to fix them. Here is an example below.

• Shapes and Positional Language - The children loved learning new facts about familiar shapes such as circles, triangles, squares and rectangles. We enjoyed watching Numberblocks in lessons to consolidate our shape knowledge. We spent time reading 'Rosie's Walk' which has helped us to develop our positional language (across, around, over, past, through, under, next to, in, on, under, behind).

BBC Numberblocks Episode

Rosie's Walk by Pat Hutchins - Read Aloud on YouTube