10 Fun Activities to Support Early Maths Skills at Home

Building early maths skills sets a strong foundation for children’s learning and confidence. By turning everyday moments into opportunities for children to explore numbers, shapes, and patterns you can support your child's learning while connecting and having fun together. Here are ten engaging activities that make maths fun and natural at home. These ideas encourage hands-on learning and help children develop important skills like counting, sorting, measuring, and problem-solving.

1. Counting with Everyday Objects

Children learn best when they can touch and see what they are counting. Use common household items like buttons, coins, or pasta pieces to practice counting. Ask your child to count out a specific number of items or group them in sets.

• Start with small numbers (1 to 5) and gradually increase.

• Encourage counting together aloud, touching each item as you say the number. This helps to ensure they understand that we say one number for each object (we call this 1:1 correspondence). Remember to repeat the final number and emphasise that this is how many there are altogether.

• Mix objects of different sizes and shapes to make it more interesting. For example, you could ask your child to count 10 buttons and then sort them by colour or size. This activity strengthens number sense and introduces sorting skills.

2. Shape Hunt Around the House

Shapes are everywhere, and recognizing them helps children understand the world. Go on a shape hunt together to find circles, squares, triangles, and rectangles in your home.

• Create a checklist by drawing shapes on paper for your child to find.

• Talk about the properties of each shape, like the number of sides or corners.

• Challenge your child to find objects that match each shape.

• Use a mixture of formal and informal language to describe shapes and objects in your home environment such as pointy, curved, wiggly or straight to key things interesting.

  
  

This activity builds visual discrimination, understanding of the properties of shapes and develops vocabulary related to geometry.

3. Cooking and Measuring Together

Cooking offers a practical way to explore maths concepts like measuring, fractions, and sequencing.

• Let your child help measure ingredients using cups and spoons.

• Talk about full, half, and quarter cups to introduce fractions.

• Follow the recipe steps in order to practice sequencing.

  
  

For example, baking biscuits together can support children's understanding of quantities and timing.

4. Sorting and Classifying Toys

Sorting toys by colour, size, or type helps children develop logical thinking and categorisation skills.

• Use bins or trays to separate toys into groups.

• Ask your child to explain why they sorted items a certain way.

• Introduce new sorting categories like shape or texture.

  
  

This activity encourages observation and reasoning, key skills in early maths.

5. Number Games with Dice and Cards

Games involving dice or number cards make learning numbers exciting and interactive.

• Play simple board games that require counting spaces.

• Use dice to practise subitising (recognising the quantity of a small set of objects without needing to count them) This skill is a vital foundational building block in supporting number sense.

• Create matching games with numerals and items to reinforce both numeral recognition and what the numerals represents.

  
  

These games improve counting speed and mental maths.

6. Building Patterns with Beads or Blocks

Patterns are a fundamental concept in maths. Use beads, blocks, or coloured paper to create and extend patterns.

• Start with simple AB patterns (red, blue, red, blue).

• Encourage your child to predict what comes next.

• Create more complex patterns as they progress. Ask them to create their own for you to copy

  
  

Recognising and creating patterns supports problem-solving and sequencing skills.

7. Using a Calendar to Explore Time

Calendars help children understand days, weeks, and months, introducing the concept of time.

• Mark special events or birthdays on the calendar.

• Count down the days to a holiday or outing.

• Talk about yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

  
  

This activity builds awareness of time and develops planning skills.

8. Use daily routines such as getting dressed

• Helping children to count their socks and shoes on will help with early counting skills, lead this onto talking about pairs as your child gets older.

• Counting arms, legs and fingers into clothes will help with early maths and also body awareness for younger children.

• Brushing teeth for a 2 minutes will not only support good oral health but also give children experience of time – you could support your child to set a digital timer or use a sand timer for a visual representation of the passage of time.

9. Measuring with Non-Standard Units

Before using rulers, children can measure objects using items like blocks, hands, or string.

• Choose an object to measure and count how many units long it is.

• Compare lengths of different objects.

• Talk about which objects are longer or shorter.

  
  

This hands-on measuring activity develops estimation and comparison skills.

10. Solving Problems in Everyday Situations

Create simple problems based on daily life to encourage maths thinking.

• “We have 3 plates on the table. Is that enough for all of us? How many more do we need?”

• “We have 4 cars to play with. How can we make sure it's fair for you and your friend?”

• How many pieces of apple do we need for everyone?

  
  

Everyday problems help children apply maths to real situations and improve reasoning.