Activities to Celebrate Maths Week at your Primary School

In my experience, in school, children either love maths or absolutely hate it. At school I hated maths. I struggled through to get my GCSE and I was so relieved when I could give it up! I still avoid maths and everything to do with it however I do wish I could get over my mental block with the subject. 

Maths is such an important subject and is so integral to the modern world in engineering, computing and science that it is vital more young people gain an interest in the subject in the hope that they pursue it at university or as a career. So how can we do this and help young children enjoy mathematics?

Maths Week England was set up in 2019 with the goal of ensuring that no children miss out on the opportunities that being a confident, competent mathematician can give them. In 2021 it became the largest national maths festival in the world. 

Here are some activities you can set in class to celebrate maths week and make learning mathematics fun.  

Marshmallow Shapes

If toothpicks can’t be trusted in tiny hands, you could use straws and larger marshmallows to challenge children to build different shapes. As kids construct their shapes, they’ll learn how many sides, faces, corners and vertices each shape has. You can find more construction themed activities on our blog 6 Building Activities to Introduce Engineering Basics.

Magic Potions

Using your class cuddly toy or a finger puppet as a potion master in this exercise ask the children to make your class mascot a potion. Give the children the recipe, for example 2 cups of orange water, 3 cups of blue water and 1 cup of red water, and then ask them how many cups they used altogether. The children will not even realise they are solving sums as they will be having so much fun! To adapt this for older children you could give them measurements to weigh out for each liquid, e.g. Add 355ml of orange liquid and 423ml of blue liquid. 

Times Tables Tricks 

Check out this great video from Oxford Owl with a neat way of learning 7 times tables with snakes and ladders!

Oxford Owl have plenty of fun worksheets and videos on their website which you can share with parents to help them with home learning.  

We couldn’t forget about the teachers! Can you solve the following maths brain teasers that we have previously posted on our social channels? Answers can be found at the bottom of the page, but no cheating!

Brainteaser 1 

Brainteaser 2

Brainteaser 3

Brainteaser 4

It's clear that young people of school age and beyond are very passionate about doing what they can to save the planet. But, in order to ensure they have all of the necessary tools and skills to do this, we need to make sure they're taking a keen interest in STEM subjects.

Answers

1) 59 days  2) 17, and the younger brother 7 3) 19 4) £12,000