Did you know that maths isn’t just remembering numbers, it’s part of everything we see and do and even how our bodies are made! From home, to school, to the park and all the places in-between, you can see real-world examples of maths. For example when using measurements in a recipe or deciding how long it will take to get to the next destination in the car, setting your alarm to wake up in the morning and even watching TV and shopping. You are using maths!The maths department at King’s College Doha are great advocates of using real-life scenarios to help put your mental math’s skills into practice without even realising it – they take every opportunity to explore maths at school using experiments involving chocolate, dinosaurs, our own bodies and the button box!!
A brilliant way to help make maths fun and improve your mental maths skills is to use simple calculations to explore the numbers you encounter every day. See the tips and tricks section for some fun ideas provided by King’s maths department, for using maths whilst outside of school.
To bring maths alive in the classroom, King’s have had a great term exploring some fun ideas with their children. The very youngest children explored counting, sorting and classifying using the button box and ‘billions of bricks’ of all shapes and sizes. Reception pupils took their maths lessons into Doha to explore the repeated patterns and symmetry they found and Year 1 waddled into the world of penguins where they counted on in groups of 2, 5 and 10 and tried to solve how to successfully package fish for each of the penguins based on the restrictions provided by the containers.
Year 2 entered the world of giants as they tested their measurement skills by creating giants exactly 10 times taller than the average height of the children in their class. Decorating the giant to resemble Jack and The Beanstalk from their recent performance provided even more fun!The stories behind the learning provided the line of enquiry and gave the children that all-important ‘hook’ and the purposeful practice of setting about the tasks helped to encourage mathematical fluency, which is so very important in young mathematicians. Higher order thinking skills of linking and metacognition were explored as the children applied their new-found knowledge to the tasks in hand.Fabulous work from King’s staff and students.
