Greater than & Less than (> & <)

I began by leaving the above picture and sentence on the whiteboard for the first half of the day... The girls were intrigued: Why did I write it? What's it for? Why does the crocodile always want more?? I just told them it always did... SNAP! 🐊

When we were ready for our "lesson" later in the day, I asked them how many monkeys were on the left? 3, so I wrote it underneath. How many monkeys were on the right? 1, so I wrote that underneath too. Which side did the crocodile want to eat? The one with more, so 3 - and I drew the > symbol in between in the same colour as the crocodile. Then I read the number sentence out loud to them: 3 is greater than 1. This > symbol means greater than. So what if there was 1 monkey on the left and 3 monkeys on the right? I wrote the numbers underneath with a blank space in between. Which side will the crocodile face now? MashaAllah the girls understood and told me he would face the other way, so I filled in the blank and read this number sentence out too: 1 is less than 3. The < symbol means less than.

The crocodile always wants more! His open mouth will always go towards the bigger number. SNAP! 🐊

Leaving that on the board, we then got the toy animals out and I gave the girls a < card each (they could flip it over to make it >!). I laid out two groups of animals and the girls needed to decide which card to put in the middle. After each question, we "read the sentence" out loud, i.e. "5 is greater than 2". After a few of these, with the toy crocodile then without, I repeated the activity using the number pieces from their Melissa & Doug jigsaw (only because I didn't feel like writing out numbers if we already had some!).

I took the opportunity to practise their mental maths too by getting them to compare the total on each side rather than just a number. 👌

Finally, they were able to complete the top half of the worksheet they did the other day on adding/subtracting 1s and 10s to 2 digit numbers (Collins Easy Learning - Mental Maths (Ages 5-7)).