Familiarise your child with colour names as this is used as a preliminary to ‘number’ at school.

Your child can also be encouraged to develop an awareness of number:

• Putting shopping away and sorting.
• Tidying toys into specific places.
• Sorting socks and shoes into pairs.
• Counting cutlery for the family meal.
• Number rhymes and songs.
• Number games – snap and dominoes.
• Dot to dot activities.

You can also help your child to use some mathematical language:

• Positional words – in, on, under, beside, left and right.
• General size words – smaller, bigger, biggest, longer etc.
• Telling times of the day for daily routines – morning, afternoon, Monday etc.
• Using money and handling coins also helps.