Are you looking for fun learning activities for half term? Don't look further! Our Maths teachers collected some tips and ideas to bring Maths into everyday activities. Keep your children entertained while boosting their creative learning with these fun ideas. Read our first post with recommendations suitable for year 1-6 students.

Year 1 & 2 - Playing with water

Instructions: Before you throw out your recycling, collect some bottles, tins and plastic containers of different sizes. Remove their labels and put them in order from smallest to largest. This may not be that obvious for children as they could be of different shapes.

Fill the smallest container with water and experiment to find out how many times you need to empty the smallest container to fill all of the others in turn. Note your findings. Then, try the same again but start by filling the second smallest container and using that to fill the others.

  • Are you noticing any patterns?portrait-of-a-cute-boy-having-a-bottle-of-refreshing-water
  • Can you start to make any predictions?

Measure the capacity of the smallest container.

  • Can you use the results of your earlier experiment to estimate the capacity of all of the other containers?
  • Now measure them all and find out how accurate you were.
Year 3 - 6 - Collecting Leaves

[gallery ids="3262,1162,3261"]

Instructions:  Go to the park and collect leaves off the ground at random. It would be great if this park contained a variety of trees!

  • Investigate online what types of leaves you have collected, e.g. ash, elm, oak.
  • Count up how many of each leaf type you have. Try counting in ones or skip counting in 2s, 3s, 5s or 10s. Which is easier? Which is quicker?
  • Make a tally chart with these species as titles and tally per leaf type

table

  • Can you use your data to find the mean number of leaves of each type?
  • What is the most popular leaf? What is the least popular? What is the range of your data?
  • Make a bar chart of your results
  • How else could you display your data? What theme could you use?
  • Do you think you would get the same results on a different day or in a different park?

Read the second part here with activities for year 7-11 students.