Numeracy

Numeracy in Bicicletta is based around hands on activities that relate to children's daily lives, help them make sense of the world around them and build strong foundational concepts. 


We have several daily routines in Bicicletta that help us keep our learning community organised, make sense of the world around us and build important concepts.  


Some of the activities that we aim to do each day that incorporate numeracy are the calendar and counting the number of days that we have been at school.  

The passage of time is an important and potentially confusing concept for children.  Because it cannot be seen or physically felt it takes practice to learn to use and interpret the different ways that we represent time.  Each day we move the counter along the calendar to today's date, identify the month season and weather, and work out what day of the week it is today, tomorrow and yesterday.  

Tracing up the chart to find the name of today

We also count the number of days that we have been at school. We have two systems for counting this; our first system is a set of three boxes, labelled hundreds, tens and ones.  Some of the children queried why we need to divide them up into these three boxes, so we have added a second system, in which all the straws are added into one box.  Every day we add a new straw to each system and count how many we have all together.  We are going to decide which system is better as the year goes on.

We also have a counter which we move along a number chart each day. Once the new straws have been added to the boxes, we work out how many tens and how many ones we have before writing the numeral on our chart, and in the air with our magic pencils (the ones attached to our elbows, knees and tongues are currently the favourites).