This week was Maths Week Scotland 2020!

This year there was a focus on outdoor maths and we explored lots of exciting concepts like addition, subtraction, measure and shape!

 

Every morning the boys and girls have some ‘speedy skills’ activities and games to try when they come in to class. These were all centred around maths this week.

‘We were trying to balance the scales. You have to make the same number of gems.’- Zack

‘You had to write calculations and they had to have the same answer.’- Cameron

‘You need to double the numbers.’ -Ashley

‘You roll the dice then you double the number. You put a cube on the number.’- Kayla

‘You had to pick a cube and then you had to roll the dice. What you got you move that number. Then you add the number on the dice and the number on the card.’ Charlie

Theo was the winner!

‘You get a calculation on a peg. You have to find the answer. You peg it on the right answer.’ Rayna and Miller

Numicon City

‘You had to put the numicon on to the buildings and match them. Then you count the windows.’ – Ben

‘You had to find the buildings that were the tallest, shortest, widest and had the most windows.’ -Caleb

‘There were cups and you had to figure out if the calculation was true or false. Then you put it in the right cup.’ – Ibrahim

‘You have to find the calculation and then make a tower of the calculation. Then you put it on top to show the answer.’ Josh

‘We were doing the crab drive. Each number on the dice was a part of the crab.’- Rory

‘First you needed to roll a 6 because you had to start with the body.’ -Magnus

‘If you have done all the numbers up to 6 and made a crab then you are the winner.’ -Harry

 

In pairs, the children used natural concrete materials to answer numeracy questions. Once they had the answer they used the numbers to crack the code! Everyone worked so well together, showing excellent focus and team work.

‘You had to crack the code. You had to do the calculations with leaves, sticks and stones. Then you use the answer to crack the code.’- Alexander

‘The code said ‘turtle!’- Archie

Ethan and Matthew worked well as a team to get some house points and crack the code together!

We tried some more speedy skills games and resources later on in the week.

‘I used the shapes to make a gnome. I used a square, a triangle and some rectangles.’ -Aaron

‘You had to get the tokens and put them into one cup. You shake the cups together then see how many is in each cup!’ – Mia

‘You had to put the pom poms at the mirror to see how much it makes. It showed you the double in the mirror.’- Ethan

‘You use the stretchy things (elastic bands) to make stuff like animals.’- Myles

‘You can make squares or rectangles.’- Rayna

On Wednesday, we had a whole day all about measure!

We were thinking about words like tallest and shortest. We measured Miss McCann and Miss Goodwin to see who was the tallest!
We ordered ourselves from tallest to smallest in the class.

‘We put things in order form the longest to the shortest. The aeroplane was the longest.’- Matthew

 

After this we started to explore using a metre stick! We looked for things that were taller than 1m, about 1m and the smaller than 1m.

We then took part in some measure problem solving!

‘There was bridge that you need to go under to go to a party. It was 1m tall. We had to make characters that were smaller than 1m and taller than 1m to see if they could go to the party.’- Harry

 

On Friday morning, we filled in a table about things in the class. In pairs, the children looked for items to measure that were taller than 1m, about 1m and smaller than 1m.

‘My pencil was 13 cm.’- Charlie

‘I was measuring my water bottle. Mine was taller than Ibrahim’s.’- Harley

We linked our measure learning to our Under the Sea topic!
The children helped to order sea creatures in metres from smallest to biggest.

‘You had to start with the smallest sea creature. I was the giant clam.  Then went to the biggest.’- Willow

‘We put them in length order.’- Cameron

Our final Maths Week challenge was to draw our sea creatures to scale outside! In partners, everyone drew their creatures with chalk, wrote how long they were, their name and drew a picture of them!

‘I was working with Kayla to measure how long a whale shark is. It is 18 metres.’- Amelia

When everyone was finished, we took a learning walk to compare the sizes of the creatures! Some boys and girls wanted to lie down to see how big they were next to their sea creature.

‘ We drew a giant clam and it was 1m and 50 cm. The line is the size of the clam. The clam was bigger than Archie.’ – Zack

Sumdog has been a big hit for Maths Week too! Well done to everyone who took part in the competition!

‘I liked playing Sumdog for maths week.’ – Theo

‘I liked that I completed all the challenges on Sumdog and I liked working with other people to do maths things.’- Eva