🔎 Project information
- Project name: The Mighty Mathematicians
- Service: Spotted Frog Kindergarten, Lake Haven
- Award: Joint NSW Winner of the Excellence in Early STEM Education Awards 2024
- Frequency: Daily for 4 months
- Number of children: 54
- Age of children: 3-6 years
💥 Project Spark
While engaging in tea party and shop role-play, the children encountered an unanticipated problem: some food items were missing from their resource box. This sparked the children’s interest in finding out “How can we stop our food from going missing?“
🧪 Experimenting & Testing
The educators supported a discussion with question prompts such as “How can we remember what resources we took out of the box?”. This led to the children brainstorming mathematical methods to sort, classify, count, and document their items to ensure objects didn’t go missing again.
One idea the children explored was to develop a tally system to take stock of their items. They started by placing bowls and plates in their play shop to help them sort their food items visually, for example placing bananas in one bowl and carrots in another. They then designed a tally system: they drew the different food items on a piece of paper and then added ticks next to each item to indicate the amount of stock available. The result: no more items were lost!
Inspired by the success of their tally system, the children and educators discussed different ways in which they could use tallies in their everyday lives. For example, using tallies to:
- Count scores in games, such as air hockey and soccer kicks.
- Survey their emotions with emojis to represent happy, sad, and other feelings.
- Count the cars passing on the street based on their features, such as their colours.
The new tally system sparked an idea for another type of play shop: a snow cone shop! The children successfully planned and implemented this idea by putting into practice their new math confidence and competence with tallies, counting, and sorting.
🏘️ Family engagement
Spotted Frog engaged with families throughout the course of the project. For example, children were encouraged to use their “emotions tallies” at home, teach their families how to play their invented game of “Pop It Toss” using a tally score system, and share their “car colour tally” on the weekends. This supported families to extend their children’s math learning at home.
Joint NSW Winner: Excellence in Early STEM Education Awards 2024
This project was the 2024 Joint NSW Winner of the Excellence in Early STEM Education Award as part of the Little Scientists Early STEM Education Awards. These biennial awards call upon early learning services and classrooms to nominate by submitting an inquiry-based STEM project co-developed with their children 0-8 years. Projects were judged on originality, STEM content, alignment to the inquiry cycle, child-led approach, and use of a gender lens.