For our mathematics this week we will continue to explore materials with a focus on fruit to make a fruit salad.

Plan to make a fruit salad. 

Encourage your child to have a go at writing numbers and to make a fruit salad shopping list.  Talk about the ingredients needed to make the fruit salad.

Do lots of touch counting and ask questions such as:

How many fruits altogether, how many strawberries? how many segments of orange? which fruit do we have most of?  Encourage problem solving by asking questions such as how many left if we take two away or add two more?

 Change the words to the nursery rhyme ‘five currant buns in the bakers shop’ to for example ‘five juicy apples in the green grocers shop, round and red with a stalk on the top’.  Perhaps you could make five cardboard apples with a number written on each one (to develop number recognition) and use the rhyme to practise counting down.

Encourage the use of comparative language to describe the fruit e.g. big, small, bigger, biggest, smaller, smallest etc.

The story The Hungry Caterpillar is a fantastic story with a wealth of mathematical concepts that can be drawn from it.

Listen to the story together.  Ask your child questions based on the story.

If you have a printer there are some free online printable activities available.

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