This week we have been celebrating Maths Week Scotland and think about all things number! Our main skill was counting backwards from 10 and to help us with this we read the story ‘Ten Terrible Dinosaurs’. The story got us thinking about what actually happens when we count backwards and to help us understand this we acted out the story with some dinosaurs from our class.

We used ten frames to further our understanding. We filled the ten frame with counters and took one counter away at a time. We also placed a certain number of counters in our ten frame and discussed strategies we could use to make a different amount. We have been learning the terms ‘1 more’ and 1 less’.

We then worked with a partner to build towers with the multilink cubes. We started by building a tower with 10 cubes, then 9 and so on. We could see the towers getting smaller each time. Some of us counted our towers or measured them against another one to check they were correct.

We also explored counting backwards with Numicon and some number lines in our tuff spot.

We demonstrated our understanding of counting backwards from ten by completing an activity where we had to fill in the missing numbers. Some of us found this quite challenging as we had to really think about which number was missing.

We ended our week using the iPads to correctly order the numbers on the caterpillar, backwards of course!

As much as we loved celebrating Maths Week Scotland the highlight of our week was a visit from our buddies. The buddies had written their own non-fiction books as part of their learning and wanted to share them with us. We loved spending time with them!