A SNOWY IDEA: Go outside and make some snowballs with someone else from your household. Who has made more snowballs? Who has fewer snowballs? 

After working hard on our numbers to 10 last week, we are now going to compare numbers within 10. To start our week off of comparing numbers within 10, today we are going to keep our activity practical and begin to familiarise ourselves with the comparative language again. At school, children have already been introduced to the language of ‘more’ and ‘fewer’ when comparing numbers within 5. ‘Fewer’ can be a trickier concept to understand and some children use the terminology ‘less’ which is fine too.

If you have blocks, Lego, Duplo, anything to build with at home, grab these for some maths fun today. Using these blocks you are going to make two towers. For example, you might make one tower with 4 blocks and one with 6. Which tower has more blocks? Which tower has fewer or less blocks? How do you know? What about if you made a tower using 5 blocks and another tower using 5 blocks? Which one has more now? Which one has fewer? Or are they the same?

If you don’t have any of the above items to make towers with, please do not worry. We can also practise using the language of more/fewer, using counting objects. Grab a handful of one type of counting object and a handful of another (e.g. grapes and blueberries). Count the grapes. Count the blueberries.  Do you have more grapes or more blueberries? Do you have fewer grapes or fewer blueberries? How do you know?

A good tip for helping us to compare the two sets of objects is to align them. We did this at school when we compared numbers to 5. I aligned my objects earlier so that I could compare which set had more and which set had less. Take a look at the photos below to see how we can align objects.

Are there more grapes or more blueberries?

I can put my objects into two lines to help me to compare them.

I have aligned my objects by lining up one grape with one blueberry. By aligning these objects I can see that there are more grapes.

I have counted my objects to check. I have 7 grapes. I have 4 blueberries. I know that 7 is a bigger number than 4 so I know that there are more grapes.

You can have a go at this activity lots of times with different amounts. Sometimes your adult might ask you to find ‘more’, sometimes they might ask you to find ‘fewer’, so listen carefully.

The aim of today is to use practical methods to familiarise ourselves with that language of ‘more’ and ‘fewer’ again. However, if you have aced this and would like a challenge then see the game below.

Challenge: If you want a challenge today, log onto Education City. In the search bar, type ‘Fruit Shop’. Then click on ‘Mathematics’ and ‘EYFS’ from the menu on the left hand side. The ‘Fruit Shop’ game should then appear at the top of your list. This game uses a variety of terms to ask children to compare two sets of objects. More/less, larger/smaller and greater/fewer are all used in the questions so is a good challenge to see if children can use alternative terminology to compare sets of objects to 10.