Teaching for Mastery in Reception 

At Runnymede St Edward's, we see teaching for mastery in maths as allowing the pupils to gain a deep understanding of maths, allowing them to acquire a secure sense of number that allows them to make continual progress to move onto more complex topics.

There are six key areas of early mathematics learning, which collectively provide a platform for everything children will encounter as they progress through their maths learning at primary school, and beyond. They include counting and cardinality, comparison, composition, pattern, shape and space and finally measures. 

The children have responded wonderfully to all our maths learning, they love playing games, problem solving, noticing and demonstrating their mathematical thinking. Enjoy!

What is Number Sense?

We begin our mathematical journey by developing our perceptual subitising of numbers 1-3. Subitising is a natural human skill that we all have from birth. Babies recognise or track their parents eyes and nose or eyes and mouth, naturally developing their sense of 3. In the foundation years, we build om this innate ability and hone our 'noticing' skills within our surroundings. In the autumn term, we practised 'noticing' sets with 'more' things or 'fewer' things and small amounts. Look at this beautiful picture that one of our children captured showing '3' and '1' in our wooded area!

Enjoying a game of 'Noughts and Crosses'. Can you spot the 3 in a row?

Next we begin to develop our skills in 'conceptual' subitising, along with 'perceptual' subitising and part/whole reasoning with numbers 1-5. This is the ability to recognise smaller amounts within larger amounts. We continually ask the children to answer these questions: What do you see? How do you see it? This enables children to verbalise what they are 'noticing', e.g. "That's 3, a 2 and a 1!" We used the fabulous book 'Junk DNA' by Clare Thompson to explore 'conceptual subitising' within our provision. This is a wonderful example of one of our children noticing groups of 2 within his artistic creation!

Understanding and recognising amounts on a 5 frame is our next step in learning. We do this in a number of ways but our daily routines within provision are especially useful when developing these skills. For example, each morning our children will find their name/picture and add it to the 5 frame. Initially, they notice when frames are 'full' or 'empty', this develops to noticing when frames are a 'finished group of 5'. Eventually we combine two 5 frames together to create a unit of 10.  Children are beginning to notice how many more to finish the frame. This work supports addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

Daily Self Registration

We learn to see 1, 2 and 3, 4 and 5 on a 5 frame using set patterns and learn to recognise these amounts quickly. Here is a group of children enjoying a game of 'Hide the Pom Pom'. They had to identify the correct cup by looking at the 5 frame patterns!

Finally our work will focus on gaining a secure understanding of numbers to 10 and moving beyond 10 to understand and create concept images of 1 and 2 digit numbers in preparation to moving on into Key Stage 1.

Additionally, within our Early Years curriculum we plan for opportunities to count for ordinality, problem solve in meaningful contexts, explore shape, pattern and spatial awareness.

Here we are subitising the number of eggs that are needed in the recipe and problem solving the number of cake cases needed to fill the tray. Can you spot 3 finished groups of 3?

Here we are role playing the rhyme '5 Currant Buns' to problem solve what happens when 1 cake is bought. We used the language '1 less than' to verbalise the calculation.

Here, one of our Reception children is exploring pattern in the Transient Art area. Her 'noticing' and subitising skills came in handy too!