Inspirational Maths week in P5B

We’ve thoroughly enjoyed taking part in Inspirational Maths Week. We started the week off by reinforcing the key message – everyone can do well in Maths. This message builds on our growth mind set about Maths.

We revised rounding numbers to the nearest 10, 100 or 1000. There were ‘mild’, ‘spicy’, ‘hot’ and ‘extra hot’ activities.  Mrs Laidlaw was impressed by the number of children willing to challenge themselves.  They were all successful learners so should feel proud of their achievements.

We know that when children think about Maths visually as well as with numbers and symbols they are crossing the brain, using different pathways.  That has been found to increase the power of Maths learning.  We enjoyed investigating a really interesting representation of numbers; to think visually about them and to explore patterns in numbers.

We watched a short video about how maths is not about speed. This was a good message to the class…it is not about who gets their work done fastest, but about understanding it!

We then did a paper folding activity. Children were given a square of paper and fold it into different shapes.   They then had to convince a sceptic that their new shape was what the said it was. Eg they were asked to make a square ¼ the size of the original square and then convince a friend that it was in fact a square that was a ¼ of the original square.  Some of the arguments were:

It has four equal sides.

It has four corners.

It has 4 right angles.

The ¼ square fits into the original square exactly 4 times.

We finished with a dot activity which demonstrated that we all work things out in different ways!

 

The next Inspirational maths activity was about finding patterns in maths! We watched a clip about Fibonacci’s sequence which creates a spiral and spirals can be found in nature.

We then explored Pascal’s triangle by finding the different numbers, adding the rows and colouring the odd numbers to see patterns. This was challenging but very interesting.

It has been great to look in maths in a different and interesting way. It has challenged the class and the children have learned a lot.

Here we are hard at work figuring out Pascal’s triangle!