This is the collection of all articles currently written for the Young Minds Big Maths site. Open the filter menu below to filter to articles matching (all of) the selected topics.
Children might enjoy gathering data when playing with different toys around the classroom. Click on the sections below to see some examples and ideas of how ...
A great way for children to learn about statistics is for them to collect data from the world around them. Click on the sections below to see some examples a...
Children can find statistics particularly engaging when they use graphs to learn about themselves. Click on the sections below to see some examples and ideas...
Many children like drawing different shapes, and there can be some entertaining drawing tasks that they can do by drawing shapes in shapes.
Many children enjoy experimenting with mirrors in the nursery, and these children were experimenting with two mirrors placed at 90 degrees from each other. I...
Some children at nursery study vegetables and fruit as a topic. Here are some ways that this topic could link to mathematical concepts.
Children who are interested in learning about number sequences may enjoy working with triangular numbers. These are a sequence of numbers that increase by a ...
If children are interested in creating different shapes, they may find flexagons particularly interesting. Flexagons are a type of model that has hidden surf...
Dice are a great tool for learning about probability and distributions. Here are a few ideas of activities children could try.
After learning about moving bridges, the children at a nursery became interested in learning about cogs. They spent some time playing with a set of cogs in t...
Inspired by a discussion about concentric circles, some nursery practitioners encouraged the children at a nursery to create some concentric circles. Through...
Some children were interested in finding concentric circles in nature and started experimenting with dropping rocks into a puddle to watch the ripples they c...
Many children enjoy experimenting with bridges. In one nursery, the children experimented with building bridges. They started by using some blocks in the cla...
Some of the nursery children had been looking at finding concentric circles in nature. Some examples of this include looking at ripples in ponds and the ring...
Triangles are one of the most useful shapes, occurring throughout maths. There are several different types of triangles, each having its own unique propertie...
Children can experiment with using perspective to help them learn about the world around them. In one nursery, the children were particularly interested in t...
In the image below, we can see a child’s attempt to fill a circle with square tiles. This is an avenue into exploring tessellation. Is there a way that the t...
Some children wanted to investigate what happened to objects travelling down a ramp when they changed the ramp surface. They began by fixing sandpaper to one...
Many children enjoy dropping rocks into water and watching the splashes. After a few attempts at dropping rocks, they may notice that a few factors have a la...
Some children were experimenting with warm water and ice cubes. The time it took for the ice to melt depended on the ways they tried to melt the ice with the...
One child was interested in plastic egg shells and placing each half in a spot in an egg carton. They grouped the egg shells by size, letting the larger ones...
When we want to know how tall something is or how far something has travelled, we normally use standard units of measurement such as centimetres. To compare ...
Some of the children enjoy making mudcakes following a recipe. They discovered that the consistency of these cakes can be changed by adding more of one type ...
Tiles in the nursery are a great tool for allowing children to explore 2D shapes. Often, 2D shapes can be used to represent 3D concepts. In the images below,...
One child enjoyed finger painting a repeating pattern on a template of a worm. This allowed her to develop her own strategy for repeating a sequence. This ch...
Numicon is a great resource, allowing children to learn about the partitions of different numbers. Numicon are tiles representing the numbers \(1\) to \(10\)...
When playing with water, children can make use of funnels to fill containers more easily. Using the wide mouth of the funnel, some children were able to fill...
We use addition throughout our daily lives, so it can be a great idea to start a conversation about addition when carrying out an everyday activity. In this ...
In one nursery, a game that the children can play is stacking a set of cogs on top of one another. These cogs are different shapes, colours and sizes, which ...
A fun experiment with water is to see which objects float. Children could have many theories for why different objects float. It can be interesting for them ...
Rainy days can be the perfect opportunity for children to experiment with water. One example of this was a child playing with conkers in some different measu...
An angle is a measure of the difference in the direction of two lines. They can be seen all around us, and understanding them can help us do many different t...
Pi (\(\pi\)) is an irrational number that is very important in maths, especially in the maths of circles.
A group of the children were analysing cauliflower and noticed that the smaller parts of the cauliflower that we are able to remove from it, are much like th...
Following lots of interest in concentric circles in this setting, a girl brought in something that was a bit similar, but not quite the same
In shapes, we can see lots of different angles. How can we compare these angles? Here we will think about interior angles in polygons. Polygons are 2D shapes...
Concentric circles are all around us, in things we make, like tin cans and in nature, inside trees. They are a type of parallel curve, you can learn more abo...
Circles are a shape that is of particular interest to nursery school children, recurring in many discussions. The roundness of circles makes them ideal for u...
“Why do things fall?” is a common question we all have when growing up. The short answer, gravity. Gravity is the force that acts on an object, pulling it to...
In our article on gravity, we discussed how all objects have the same acceleration due to gravity. Some objects fall slower than others when dropped, due to ...
There are straight lines all around us, but how can we describe them mathematically? This is an important question if we want to compare the lines that we se...
Two lines are perpendicular to each other if they meet at a right angle (\(90\) degrees). We can see examples of perpendicular lines everywhere, where walls ...
We can see parallel lines all around us, on radiators, railway tracks and pieces of paper. What properties do lines need to have to be parallel?
Conservation of energy is a key idea in physics, and we can explore this using common items.
One common playtime toy is playdough, which allows children to experiment with many mathematical concepts.
Collecting data in the classroom can be a great way for children to learn about the things around them and statistics at the same time. There are two main ty...
One popular classroom activity is colouring, and an interesting mathematical property is the four colour theorem. If we have at least four colours, we can fi...
One fascinating thing about nature is the occurrence of the Fibonacci numbers. The Fibonacci numbers are a sequence of numbers starting \(0,1,1,2,3,5,8,...\).
Classroom experiments can not only be a fun way for children to learn about the world around them, but also a great opportunity to develop data collection te...
An interesting shape that occurs in nature is the spiral. Children can find spirals all around them, on the shells of snails, in flowers and animal horns. Th...
A common playtime activity is stacking blocks. Most of the time, children want to build the tallest towers, which leads them to question how to make their to...
Once children become excited by an idea, they often want to test and compare it, which can involve collecting some data. An example is measuring the distance...
A popular activity in nurseries is building structures. Many interesting questions can arise when children experiment with building specifically, why are tri...
Corrugated cardboard is often accessible to many children, and one common question is, Why is it so strong? This can spark an interesting conversation about ...
Many children are interested in ordering objects by size or some other property; this can lead to a discussion about permutations. A permutation is a reorder...
The word symmetry stems from Greek, meaning (very roughly) ‘having the same measure’ or ‘being in agreement’. Put simply, symmetry is concerned with whether ...
Many of the children built ramps with objects like planks of wood or sheets of carboard. The angle between the ramp/board/plank and the floor changes as the ...
Patterns which are made up and used as fabric or wallpaper are also made up of repeating “chunks”. As with our 1D patterns, we could recreate them using a si...
When two lines meet each other, they form an angle.
