Traditional fairy tales have truly captured the children’s imagination as they continue to develop their numeracy skills. Firstly, they had to work out how big their castle wall would need to be to keep giants out, then work out how big a giant really was and finally deciding that all they needed was a giant piece of paper from which they could create their giant by drawing round the tallest boy, all the while checking back through the story to ensure that they were recreating their scene in sequence.
The Smartest Giant in Town provided an inspirational starting point whereby the children used different methods of measuring tools to create items which were “bigger than”.
The Number Bunch were set of task of collating data on graphs, which practitioner had the biggest feet? However along the way some of the children decided they would like to find out which size shoe they had too, so with a little help the number was read to them. The biggest size was 8 with 5 practitioners taking a size 5.
Within cooking experiences the children were learning how to use spoons, scales and cups to measure out quantities needed for their recipes, they also enjoyed tasting the finished product.
Stories can be read anywhere in the nursery, in doing so this has strenghtened the children’s creativity skills.
