Nursery World - Learning & Development: Estimating: Part 2

Structured games designed to encourage children to estimate numbers
can improve their mathematical abilities later on in life. Dr Jo Van
Herwegen explains how the approach works.

A child's ability to estimate has a greater bearing on their mathematical skills later in life than their ability to count. It is important then that early years practitioners understand the different ways we estimate and promote these abilities in nursery-aged children.

As we saw in Part 1, we estimate in two ways:

Research has now found that these ANS abilities in pre-school children predict their mathematical abilities later on in life. Thus, the better our ANS ability, the better we are at mathematics, regardless of overall intelligence (see more information column).

DEVELOPING ANS IN YOUNG CHILDREN

I recently developed a pre-school number learning scheme called PLUS, which aims to improve pre-schoolers' ANS abilities and to give them confidence in maths by showing them that it's okay to guess numbers.

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