Review:Developing Maths Concepts:Prim-Ed

Developing Maths Concepts in the Early Years:Prim-Ed

This is a nice, chunky book for all you Infant teachers! It opens up with a chapter on how maths concepts work in the infants classroom and the pedagogical principles behind teaching and learning maths. Other nice features are the resources page and the type of things you will need in the infant classroom to get going on the maths!

The brilliant thing about this book is it is worksheet-free!

This is completely relevant to the active learning nature of our curriculum. The book is broken down into the various maths concepts and the activities associated with them. Fro example, we have number, shape, sorting, pattern, measuring and data collection concepts and these are further broken down into various settings such as Circle Time, Exploration Time, Teacher-directed, Small-group Time, Individual Learning Time and Learning throughout the day. All well researched ways for children to learn maths in an active way.

In the appendix, we have bonus resources like a planning guide for the start of the year, after a few weeks, moving on and the final weeks of the year. There are many copymasters at the back like working space, ten frames, ten strips, dot cards and so on. I could not list them all.

I have taught in Infants for a couple of years and this book is an absolute must and I am awarding it the Anseo Top of The Class Award due to its complete link with the Irish Maths Curriculum and the emphasis on easiness for the teacher yet pedagogically sound activities for the learners in the class. A win win!

You can purchase this from the prim-ed website here. for €24.95 and this too is a bargain for the research that has gone into it.