Have you ever noticed just how much the kids you teach love maths, and how, when the end of term begins to loom, they simply won’t stop nagging and pestering and asking for more maths based fun to help sustain them through the long, hot, arithmetic free days of the holidays? No, of course you haven’t. As far as the vast majority of kids are concerned, doing maths is a bit like eating vegetables; they grudgingly accept, having been told so often, that it’s good for them, but they’d much rather they didn’t notice while they were doing it. Hence pasta sauces packed with very finely chopped carrots and celery. The ideas below are a few mathematical equivalents of finely chopped carrot and celery, which is a terrible metaphor but, then again, this is about maths, not English….
Run to Your Number
An idea that encourages early number recognition and does so, what’s more, via that well-worn method of getting kids to run around outside. Take the kids out into the playground and give each of them a piece of chalk. Each child is then assigned a number to chalk onto the floor. When you shout a number, they all have to run to that number. You could use the same method to aid recognition of shapes, colours letters and even mathematical symbols.
Hit the Target
A game which uses playing cards to introduce a competitive edge to the skill of creating equations. Remove the face cards from a pack of playing cards and deal them out, four cards each, face down, between two or more players. Put the remaining cards in the centre of the table and turn over the top card, which then becomes the target number. The players then turn over their hands at the same time and have to add, subtract, divide or multiply the numbers they have in order to hit the target. The first to do so wins the hand.
Battleships
The grand old parlour game Battleships has its uses in the classroom since the kids, whilst gleefully sinking each other’s fleet, will be utilising both the use of co-ordinates and deductive reasoning.
Restaurant Challenge
A concrete example of how maths works in the real world. Give the kids a list of ingredients and other overheads and get them to devise and create a pizza capable of turning a profit (if you can actually provide a base and the raw ingredients to craft a prototype, all the better). A list of the numbers expected to sell at particular price points will encourage them to think about profit margins and overheads. Perhaps the team which comes up with the most successful recipe gets to have it cooked for them?
Maths Scavenger Hunt
Bring a stack of newspapers into the classroom, together with a list of mathematical/numerical terms such as ‘A percentage’, ‘A graph’, ‘A decimal number smaller than 1’, ‘A fraction’ etc., with the number and complexity adjusted to suit the level of the kids involved. Split them into teams and challenge them to a race to find the complete list of terms in the newspapers – tracking them down, cutting them out and sticking them onto their list.
Estimates
Get the kids thinking about factors such as numbers, measurements, and volume by asking them to estimate the size of a range of objects, from the everyday such as a double decker bus, up to the likes of The Shard or a Blue Whale. Once you’ve established the right answer to a range of items, get them to create their own equations, or complete equations you’ve started, such as ‘A double decker bus multiplied by how many Blue Whales equals 3 London Eyes?’
All too often, the question kids asked when faced with a maths question is ‘Why will I ever need to know this?’ And, all too often, given the dry, theoretical nature of much maths teaching, this can be a tricky question to answer. Turning maths in games or real world based activities can both answer this question and slip a few facts in under the radar. If you’ve come up with an activity that serves this purpose, then tweet it to us @Futureschool. Who knows, maybe we can make ‘boring maths’ a thing of the past.
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