Mathmatical Snack
Children revel in the responsibilities given and enjoy the experience of helping each other to solve problems during snack time. Food and drink items are selected carefully by the practitioner so that problems of increasing difficulty are experienced by the children over time. By working together, the children identify the problem for themselves and decide upon a solution. At its simplest level this may be recognising an item is missing and collecting it. At a more complex level this could be dividing into fair portions. The most important thing is that the provision of the snack is ‘sabotaged’ by the practitioner in some way so that the children have to both identify the problems and solve them for themselves. Children, therefore, need time to experience and understand the problem and engage in reasoning about possible solutions.
