Description:
Early Childhood Webinar Series
We’re excited to announce that the Early Childhood Webinar Series will continue in 2026. With a focus on mathematics in early childhood education, these sessions are designed to support your professional learning and explore how maths can be thoughtfully embedded in play-based and emergent curricula. Bringing together current research and practitioner expertise, each webinar will spotlight a key aspect of early childhood mathematics, offering practical strategies, fresh insights, and inspiring examples to help you notice, nurture, and extend mathematical thinking through everyday play.
Webinar Four: Spatialising Early Numeracy: Setting the Foundations for Reasoning about Number in the Early Years
Young children begin developing powerful number ideas well before formal schooling through everyday play—sorting, comparing, building, sharing, and noticing patterns and quantities in the world around them. These experiences are typically hands-on and contextual, and growing research highlights a strong link between early number development and spatial reasoning.
Spatial reasoning—visualising and manipulating objects and environments, navigating space, and imagining movement, rotation, and transformation—supports children to make sense of quantitative relationships in rich, non-counting ways. When children stack towers, group and distribute objects, arrange loose parts, or move materials in play, they often use spatial thinking to explore ideas such as more/less, whole/part, and same/different.
This webinar explores how spatialising early numeracy can strengthen the foundations for reasoning about number in the early years. Participants will consider how playful, embodied learning experiences can extend children’s early number concepts in meaningful and connected ways, and how educators can notice, interpret, and intentionally support the spatial thinking already present in children’s everyday play.
Dr Chelsea Cutting is a Senior Lecturer in early childhood mathematics education, known for her work on early numeracy, spatial reasoning, and play-based mathematical learning. Her research explores how young children build number concepts through embodied, inquiry-driven experiences and how educators can design rich environments that support mathematical thinking. A contributor to national STEM initiatives, including the Early Learning STEM Australia (ELSA) project, she is recognised for translating complex theory into practical guidance for educators. Dr Cutting received the 2024 Early Childhood Australia Doctoral Thesis Award, acknowledging the impact and excellence of her research in advancing early childhood mathematics.
Registrations close 14th May 2026
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