5 Fun Activities for Maths Week Scotland
Maths Week Scotland returns 23rd-29th September and this year has the theme of ‘Maths Tales’. With almost 400 games and activities linked to the Scottish maths curriculum, and the majority of our activities and games being story-based, we’re delighted to be getting involved.
In this blog, we shine a spotlight on five of our maths activities, starting with Early Level games and working our way up to Second Level, to explore the stories and maths concepts behind them.
Counting in Early Years
‘Fun, two, three, four’ is an activity set in a theme park with rollercoasters, flume rides and ghost trains.
Pupils are required to line up the correct number of monsters for the seats available on the ride.
Count correctly and the pink man will allow the monsters to take their seats to enjoy the thrills and spills of the ride.
It’s a great activity, which has settings to extend the learning. At the basic level, pupils simply need to let the correct number of monsters through the turnstile. At higher levels, pupils may need to add and subtract monsters from an existing queue to reach the correct number.
Subitising in Early Years
‘Quantity Street’ is a subitising activity that swaps between two scenes: an extensive townhouse with large windows (as below) and a park with two large mopeds.
Depending on the scene, pupils are asked:
• to choose the windows with a specific number of pink men in or
• to divide a group of pink men into subgroups to ride the mopeds.
As always, the art of subitising is in selecting without counting, so speed is of the essence.
Place Value in First Level
‘Ordering tall things’ is a great, practical activity for reinforcing pupils’ understanding of place value, which relates their learning directly to real life.
With objects ranging from lamp posts and electricity pylons to blocks of flats and wind turbines, pupils are asked to drag and drop them into order from shortest to tallest.
Depending on how you set it up for your pupils, it can be played as an activity for the children to learn from as they play, or as an assessment, where the children play it once and it’s then automatically marked by Busy Things.
Addition and Subtraction in First Level
‘Splash dash: Addition and Subtraction’ is set on the beach with swimmers racing to shore. En route, they need to answer several questions by dragging and dropping the correct number to complete the equation.
Can your pupils be the first to reach land?
Play it here free and see!
Swimmers earn stars depending on whether they ranked first, second or third with stars rolling into weekly total for each school. Can your school make it to the top of the leader board?
Fractions in Second Level
‘Miner birds: Fractions’ is part of the Miner birds series, which are real favourites on Busy Things. Like the other games in the series, pupils can play against up to 3 opponents, which can either be other pupils or computers.
The aim of the game is to answer the fractions-focused maths questions to earn worms and the player who is the first to reach 20 worms is the winner.
Pupils earn more worms if they answer trickier questions but it’s not as simple as that as there are always surprises along the way.
It’s a lot of fun and everyone has a chance to win. At the outset, each child chooses their level, be that Easy, Medium or Hard and the questions are created accordingly, helping level the playing field.
Want to make it more intense? You can add a timer into the gameplay too!
Summary
We hope this blog has given you some ideas to incorporate into your Maths Week.
As part of this blog, we’ve included several activities which you can play for free from 23rd-29th September. These are: ‘Fun, two, three, four’, ‘Quantity Street’, ‘Ordering tall things’, Splash dash: Addition and Subtraction’ and ‘Miner birds: Fractions’. To play them, you just need to click on the corresponding link!
PLEASE NOTE: All links direct you to English curriculum versions of the games and are for illustration only. You will be able to opt in to the Scottish curriculum when you take a free trial.
Want to see more activities?
If you’d like to see more of our activities, we’d love you to take out a free 28-day trial with us! Simply click here for this. You’re more than welcome to have a virtual tour via Zoom too. If you’d like one, contact us here and book a time!