We had great fun celebrating maths week from the 12th to the 16th of October this year. Each day we did some fun extra maths activities alongside our maths lessons.
Our first activity was the Emoji Code Breaker. The children really enjoyed cracking the codes and while It was a little tricky at first, writing the digits over the emoji faces helped a lot. We even had to use our addition and subtraction with renaming to solve some of the problems.
On Wednesday we played an exciting game of ‘Mathopoly’. This game is similar to Monopoly except to get points you must answer different maths questions. As you move your counter around the board, each square you land on has a different question for you to answer. There were also some special squares on the board that could make you pick up a ‘chance’ or ‘challenge’ card. The ‘chance’ cards were tricks or treats, so sometimes it meant you lost some points. The children really enjoyed playing this with their classmates.
We were learning about lines and angles in maths that week, so we used our new knowledge to create some artwork. We drew cityscapes where we focussed on horizontal, vertical, diagonal, and parallel lines, as well as right angles. We got very creative with our drawings and use of colour, and really enjoyed colouring in all the different sections of our masterpieces.
During the week, we were very lucky and had opportunities to take our learning outside. One day we played a version of maths ‘rock, paper, scissors’. In teams, we each took it in turns to hop over cones towards a member of the opposite team. When we met in the middle, we played a game like rock, paper, scissors, but instead of those symbols we made a number with our fingers. The highest number won and got a point. Another day, we played a game of higher/lower where I held up a number and the children had to decide if the next number I showed would be higher or lower by running to the corresponding side. This game focused on our decision making and probability skills. We also practiced our odd and even number knowledge, where the children had to run to the even or the odd side of the hall depending on the answer to a question.
