EYFS child - amazing mathematician!

[Oncemoreuntothebreachagain]

I met a young man today who worked out 150 add 45 in his head. As he did so he also talked through his reasoning. He partitioned the 45 (didn’t use that term) and then added the 40 to the 150 and then added the remaining 5. I had asked him the question out of the blue, so he hadn’t been prepped. He also jumped up and down like tigger while doing it which was reassuringly age appropriate!

He. Is. 4 yo !! I was opened mouthed!
I’m maths lead and am slightly unsure of how best to advise my EYFS colleagues and am hoping someone else might have been in this position. They are using open-ended questions, looking at problems with more than one solution, and encouraging pattern searching.
What’s the best way to support this chap?

I would say that having mathematical tasks explicitly available in things like role play areas or during free-flow sessions would be really useful.

Things like price lists / price tags / money in shop role play areas, or - if he likes that sort of thing - sports league tables etc (lots of adding, subtracting ...and negative numbers).

Lots of non-fiction books within the book area with large numbers in - trucks, rains, boats. Top trumps also good for comparing.

Not speaking as a teacher here, but as a parent, that was the type of thing that in EYFS really 'fed' number-obsessed DS. Maths equipment like dienes, cuisinaire, linking elephants, scales, rulers etc also fun.

Tbh, it was the transition into more formal teaching in Y1 where the trouble started, simply because there was much less freedom to explore and more tasks with 'right' answers that involved smaller numbers after direct teaching.

Lots of pattern work and generalising about patterns - look at the NCETM 6 key areas of EYFS maths progression documents. Also lots of spatial reasoning

Wildmaths

@cantkeepawayforever - yes, re transitioning onto more ‘formal’ mathematical thinking, that’s a common problem. Many children can be ‘number’ obsessed at a young age, and love the thrill of finding correct answers, yet it doesn’t always translate into higher reasoning ability later on. Arithmetic and mathematics are not the same.

Homez,

Speaking as a parent not a teacherhere, the issue with DS was acually the other way round.

He was quite capable of really quite tricky reasoning (within his areas of special interest) e.g. 'For this world Cup group, what are the possible options for table positions given that everyone has to play 2 more games, and what points will everyone have in all permutations' or 'If X team plays 3 more games and they win / lose / draw with the following scores, what will their final points and goal difference be' or 'This lego pattern covers x distance, how may times would I have to repeat it if i wanted it to go out of the door'. This doesn't mean he wasn't capable of arithmetic tasks - he could add and subtract 3 digit numbers mentally too - but he loved 'playing' with numbers in context.

The difficulty in year 1 was the shift in focus to lessons that simply involved direct teaching of e.g. adding within 20, followed by a worksheet of the same, with no suitable extension.

So for him, it was the shift from reasoning to arithmetic that was the problem in terms of putting a cap on his progress, not the other way round.

Even at A-level, he got a good Gold score in the Senior Maths Olympiad while not really doing very well in the standard year 12 exams!

I'm reassured OP that there are teachers out there who are keen to offer plenty to a child like this. I was about to post as the parent of a child who is similar, asking for how I can support at home as school
/classroom teacher is disinterested/dismissive of any need to challenge, and seem to treat it more as an inconvenience that they are an outlier in the class.