Our Lower School girls enjoyed a variety of activities as part of Maths Week focussing on ensuring they all experienced maths in a different way to normal and recognising that maths is fun!
Year 9 girls from the Senior School also got involved on a visit to Year 4 where they gave them lots of exciting maths challenges to work out.
Year 1 arranged numbers and symbols to create their own number sentences to give the correct answer. Through lots of trial and error they concluded that the first number in a subtraction needs to be the biggest number. They also found out that the answer can be at the beginning of a number sentence or at the end. The girls explored positional language too and trying to distinguish between 'right and 'left'. They chose different resources from around the classroom to create their own grid of coloured objects. Then they used these grids to explain the position of a particular object using the correct vocabulary.
Year 2 learnt about ordinal numbers through physical activities like skipping and hula hooping, placing the girls in order and plotting the results on a graph.
In Year 3 the girls enjoyed many exciting puzzles, problem solving activities and investigations throughout the week. They played games with money, collected, measured and ordered the measurements of leaves and made a tally and bar chart of cars passing the school gates. Other data handling challenges included some probability work involving the colour of counters and the total scores when rolling two dice. They also made pentonimoes and investigated which ones formed nets for a boxes. Following on from this, they went on to use nets to make cubes and tetrahedrons.
Year 5 used their compass and measuring skills to draw 'curves of pursuit' with some impressive results while Year 6 investigated the relationship between area and perimeter and tried to find a shape that had an area that is numerically twice the perimeter. The girls also created an icosahedron - they started with 20 identical circles and by folding carefully, they created the exciting 3D shape without rulers or scissors. Their next challenge was to investigate how to make a tray with the greatest volume by cutting squares from each of the corners of sheets of A4 paper.
So much maths conversation and collaboration was generated throughout the week, but more importantly great fun!
