Firm Foundations Teaching Pack (Y0&1)

Numicon is based on sound and robust research spanning many decades, It is proven to have a significant and lasting impact on children's learning and future success. This is reflected in outstanding results.

Firm Foundations provides teachers and students with a conversation of maths - relationships between things, events and themselves. Young children are trying to join in with this big conversation. Mathematical conversation is exceedingly rich and varied.  It takes a while for young children to join in. Numicon's great feature is the attention paid to the language of relationships

The Firm Foundations Teaching Pack - both print and online versions provides:

• A wide range of practical ideas for helping children to develop deep understanding of numbers and number relationships, shape, space and measurement.
• Creative suggestions for extending the learning across a variety of environments where children can explore the key concepts.
• Support for developing oral language skills
• Effective questions to guide children in their making connections and conversations
• Planning and assessment support
• A detailed guide to the key mathematical ideas children will meet
• Guidance on how best to implement Numicon in your setting.
• Photocopy Masters to support the activities

Activities have been extensively trialled with teachers and children; and derive from real classroom experience.

An overview of the Firm Foundations and Online version here

A spiral approach throughout the year - Key learning here

A sample pack be downloaded here to be updated soon

More information to download here as a PDF/Powerpoint to be updated soon

The Starter Apparatus Pack is sold separately as class or 1:1 options

Other products that are used alongside Firm Foundations are:

Numicon at the Seaside  Large Foam Shapes .  Pan Balance   Firm Foundations Online

Our recommendations:

The programme is written for a full year. This is with the likelihood of children attending for a full year in those countries that run a once-a-year enrolment.

For us in NZ, we do recommend that children beginning at these time follow this sequence:

Term 1 new entrants – complete the book

Term 2 new entrants – complete most of the book

Term 3 new entrants – complete some of the book (– but this varies from school to school, because they may not be classed as Year 1’s the following year.) As Year 2’s, Numicon 1 Securing Foundations will be very important the following year.

Term 4 new entrants – continue with Firm Foundations the following year, for the year.