Maths is a language and, although we all learnt to speak it at school, depending on the teacher, the era or the educational trend of the time, we may well have learnt a very different dialect to the mathematics our children will learn in their new school. However, there are so many ways in which we can give a head start to our children if we remember that early years experience should build on what children already know and can do. This is where fun and games at home can support learning taking place at school.

As maths is a language the most important role to play in your child's development in this subject is to talk, shout and discuss about the world around them. You may be forgiven for not realising that the world is full to the brim with mathematics.

Over the next few months, we will start adding number activities that you can do at home to encourage early numeracy. They will be based on basic equipment that you will probably have on hand at home. Here are a few ideas that stretch across the range of mathematical concepts.

Stacking rings or pots in order will encourage language of size and comparison.

Use pots in the bath or with some dried kitchen goods such as rice, lentils or pasta and play around with pouring and filling and sharing. Children will be playing at will but learning about weight, capacity and ordering.

Any time you can count, whether it is oranges in the bag or red cars on the road, the more your child will be able to picture in their headí what a group of a certain number looks like. This is an excellent skill to have.

Turn taking, throwing a dice, recognising the dots, using a counter to count are all essential school numeracy skills that will prepare a child to use basic maths equipment. Please do this as often as possible. It also is crucial for personal and social development and will contribute to the playground antics!

Talking about patterns and shapes will enable your child to learn about the properties of shape and the effect of repeated patterns. Maths is made of patterns and shapes are made of numbers so it is important that children learn what they can do with them. Making pictures with different shapes or decorating them for fun will entertain your child and they will be unaware that they are learning about maths.

Ordering is important, not just numbers but people in a queue (1st, 2nd, 3rd etc.) and arranging things in order of size, weight or length is good practice for young children.

Cooking and baking, apart from the scientific concepts, are excellent for exposing your children to capacity and real numbers.

And of course, look for numbers everywhere you go. Find them on car registrations, road signs, shops, magazines, houses etc. etc. Talk about favourite numbers and why. Imagine numbers as pictures of things or make the digits into pictures by adding more things to them. Play Hopscotch and write numbers on steamed up windows. Most of all, enjoy numbers and play around with them. You don't need to do pages of sums and fill in sheets of numbers just yet, there is a wealth of other activities you can be doing to nurture a love for numbers beyond that that will actually extend understanding a lot further.