🧠 Big Learning Through Little Moments at BestStart Te Whāriki 📚 At our centre, every moment is a learning opportunity. Through play, our tamariki are building strong foundations in communication, literacy and numeracy—all while having fun and making real-world connections.
Whether it's measuring ingredients for playdough or naming shapes in their creations, our Kaiako support children to explore maths concepts in playful, meaningful ways. These experiences help tamariki grow into confident learners, ready for school and beyond.
At BestStart Te Whāriki we pride ourselves on supporting our children to have a love of life long learning and helping them to be confident and capable young people. We use many different areas of play to make connections and help them understand the world they live in.
One of the ways we do this is through play by supporting children with communication and to learn the foundations for literacy and numeracy. Supporting emergent literacy and numeracy with young children can help them to understand and develop concepts about the world they live in, setting them up for lifelong learning and helping them be school ready. Here is an example of how the Kaiako (teacher) fostered mathematics (number and measurement) through the area of Playdough.
First, she used this opportunity to make the playdough with the children, talking about the measurements and counting as she placed each item into the mixture. This exposed the children to concepts of mass and size as we measure; as well as 1-1 matching and counting, understanding that 1 cup matches the number 1 and two cups matches the number 2 and we have twice as many. The children counted along with the Kaiako and shared their excitement by pointing at the materials and wanting to stir, which they did. Some told us how they “cook at home” or “mummy cook” telling us that they are making connections to their lives through their play and communicating this with us.
The Kaiako extended the mathematical learning once the playdough was made by selecting shapes for the children to use in the playdough, pointing out the sides of the shape and asking how many sides it had, then explaining that “yes it has three sides, that makes it a triangle”. “Triangle” the child said back – forming the link between the word and what it describes. Rich topic specific vocabulary provides opportunities for learning and language acquisition – so Kaiako ensure that they are taking the opportunities to help provide examples of words when we are engaging alongside tamariki (children).
Kaiako in the nursery provide an environment where there are many opportunities to explore mathematical concepts through our play, not only playdough, but through cooking, the sandpit, collecting or resources or art. We use the 16 areas of play and each child’s interest to provide learning that is meaningful to them.