Mathematics News

Maths Vocabulary Word of the Week:

Each newsletter we will be introducing you all to a new maths vocabulary word for you to learn.

Subitising:

Summer Holiday Maths Ideas:

Normally the summer holidays come with at least a week or two of warm weather (sorry in advance if we’ve now jinxed it!), and this can present a fantastic opportunity for your child to enjoy some outdoor summer maths activities.

Summer holiday maths games with chalk!

You’ll be relieved to hear that maths games don’t have to be complicated, and all you’ll need for these particular ones is a piece of chalk and some space outside to master maths!

Whilst chalk may sound a little old fashioned, it’s an actually an irreplaceable bit of kit when it comes to holiday maths activities.

It provides your child with the ability to explore maths in a more visual sense.

One thing to note though is that although blank walls and tarmac are usually fine, be sure to check you can draw wherever you choose before going ahead!

If you have a young child, a simple place to start is by drawing numbers. This is a crucial skill top get in place at a young age, and you could turn it into a race to add an element of excitement for your child. Can they draw all the numbers up to 10 faster than you can? There’s only one way to find out…

If your child is slightly older, you could progress to drawing 2D shapes. Enlarging the shapes outdoors really helps children to remember key properties. For example, the number of sides and angles each shape has will be clearly on display through this activity, helping to cement key facts.

Progressing further, you might want to ask your child to draw shapes of a certain size. You can really go wild here depending on how much space you have. You could ask them to draw the largest shape possible in the space you have, and then to measure each side of this shape may keep them entertained for more time than you realise!

If your child is already comfortable with measuring the sides of shapes, they will probably be able to work out the perimeter. Attempting to calculate the area in centimetres or metres will provide an additional level of challenge during this summer maths activity.

Summer holiday maths – sneaky surveys

What better way to help your child practise maths than by sneaking some in during car journeys and other downtime in the summer in the form of surveys!

Carrying out surveys in the community is the sort of thing classroom teachers would be doing more of if they had more capacity working within the curriculum.

It’s an outdoor maths activity that can be easily organised, and during the holidays you might have the time to help your child conduct one themselves.

Choose a topic (different types of transport, food tastes, current events – you could cover almost anything within reason) and get out and about to discover the data.

If your child captures all their data in a tally chart first, you could then ask them to draw a bar or pie chart to further represent what they have discovered.

Presenting data they have gathered themselves will be much more fun than using information from textbooks!

Here is an example of what your child could produce:

Problems of the Week!

Prep - 2 Problem

Year 3 - 6 Problem