Early Years articles

This article explores the importance of pattern awareness with young children.

In this article, Janine Davenall reflects on children's personalised mathematical recordings as part of a small research project based in her Reception class.

In this article for Early Years practitioners, Dr Sue Gifford outlines ways to develop children's problem-solving strategies and confidence in problem solving.

This short article critiques the 'What to Expect, When' guidance, written for parents who want to find out more about their child's learning and development in the first five years.

Ruth Trundley outlines her doctoral research and concludes that development of an understanding of cardinality is a crucial element of counting that can be overlooked.

This article describes how one nursery setting focused on tidying up time as a context in which to explicitly target the development of number and calculation skills.

In this article, Dr Sue Gifford outlines how we can create positive attitudes and higher achievement in mathematics, starting in the Early Years.

This article describes how the NRICH Early Years resources aim to further develop young children's natural problem-solving abilities in the context of mathematics.

This article, written by Dr. Sue Gifford, evaluates the Early Learning Numbers Goal in England, in the light of research.

Dr Sue Gifford outlines different ways in which you might capture young children's mathematical thinking and how to send samples to NRICH.

This article discusses the revised Early Learning Goals for mathematics which were announced in June 2018.

In this article for EY practitioners, Dr Sue Gifford outlines what we mean by subitising and how we can teach it.

In this article for EY practitioners, Dr Sue Gifford discusses children's early spatial thinking and how this predicts their mathematical understanding and achievement.

In this article for practitioners, Cath Gripton and Deliah Pawluch explore the 'counting collections' approach, which encourages children to spend time playing and experimenting with counting.