Mathematics

Helping Your Child - Everyday Maths Ideas

The Victorian Government have released helpful videos which provide ideas to supporting your child in learning Maths. As we slowly begin to have more freedoms, you may like to explore Maths everyday with your children - particularly as you walk, talk, and play. See the beauty of Maths everywhere! The possibilities are endless! 

Open-ended Challenging tasks

As mentioned in the last edition of the newsletter, open-ended challenging tasks have more than one right answer or solution and can often be solved in multiple ways. The tasks can take on the form of statements, questions, tasks or projects. These type of tasks can cater to multiple needs of students and allow the opportunity for students to creatively response and reason their ideas. 

This fortnight's example is thanks to James and Toby Russo. 

Clocks

Using the iconic image of Flinders Street Station's famous clocks, engage your child in thinking about time, subtraction, probability and multiplication.

The following are example questions you might like to use:

• Which train is scheduled to leave at midday?
• Which two trains are leaving at the same time?
• If it is 11 am now, and all the clocks are showing the afternoon time, which train is leaving first?
• What is another way we can display these times?
• It takes exactly twice as long to travel from Flinders Street to Frankston than from Flinders Street to St. Albans. The Frankston train leaves at 1.30pm and arrives at Frankston at 2.34pm. What time might the train leave Flinders Street and arrive at St. Albans?
• Lots of people say that public transport should be free. What do you think are the arguments for and against this? If approximately 110,000 people pass through Flinders Street Station each day (pre-pandemic of course), and each of those passengers pays $8.60 for a daily fare, how much money all together would they pay each day? What about each year? How long would it take for these passengers to pay one billion dollars altogether? What about one trillion?
• Flinders Street Station was built in 1905. How old is it now? How much older is it than you? Can you think of other things that might be about the same age?
• There are 13 platforms at Flinders Street Station. Imagine, on average, a train departs each platform every 10 minutes and each train stays at the station for one minute. What is the probability there will be a train on Platform 7 at this exact moment? What about no platforms? On all platforms?