Etz Chaim Jewish Primary School

Maths Week 2016

Nursery enjoyed Maths Week. They have loved learning more about numicon which is a fantastic hands on resource. A favourite activity was when the children guessed the wrapped piece of numicon. The children enjoyed singing a range of counting songs and using their fingers to help them count. They have been learning how to find one more and one less. of a number The children enjoyed using a variety of different mathematical resources to help them with this. The children have enjoyed their new till in the role play area for Maths Week and have been using it to buy different exciting things.

This week, in Reception, the children enjoyed celebrating Maths Week. They used it as an opportunity to apply skills that the children have previously been taught in a fun, engaging way. They enjoyed baking cookies using numicon as cutters. They then created number bonds to 10. The children played addition games and raced to the end! It was great to see the children predicting the results and using the language of addition. They read sums and found the answers using the play dough and Unifix.

In Year 1 during Mathematics Week, They enjoyed a number of carousel activities which enhanced our reasoning skills. They loved using numicon to create pictures of a number. Also they wrote the number sentences for our picture. Can you guess what our focused number was? Can you write a number sentence for the bottle? They investigated all possible outcomes and justified our reasoning by identifying the ones that are limited by a ‘what if scenario’. Creating a repeated pattern was a highlight but using the same amount to created a symmetical pattern required our thought process to be active. They used the numicon to identify odd and even numbers and also investigated the two numbers that will total to odd or even numbers. Thus they were able to generalise a formulae. The children loved counting in steps and explaining our understanding of the sequence. They also made our own book of numbers. It’s all about ‘Time’.

In Year 2 they enjoyed our Leap Day challenges including and investigation about whether the length of our legs affects how far they can leap. They also explored different ways they could make 29 by adding 2s, 5s and 10s and they answered questions about the school calendar. On Tuesday the children had an investigation day where they had a go at solving mathematical puzzles, working in groups. They used our reasoning skills to discuss different mathematical statements and attempted to prove whether they were correct, for example, if you add three odd numbers, the answer is always odd. They tried solving a puzzle working out which numbers were represented by different pictures in a grid. They created pictures from numicon that added up to 8. On Wednesday they thought about how they could calculate how much sand is in the huge sandpit, using out reasoning and problem solving skills. The children loved exploring number poems and songs and wrote our own number rhymes on World Book Day.

Year 3 enjoyed participating in Maths Week. They had a lot of fun investigating maths and exploring concepts through games and questioning. On Monday, Year 3 joined the rest of the school by celebrating the Leap Year with ‘Leap Year’ maths. They played with number facts related to 29 and used the rules of calculating Leap Years to investigate whether famous people were born on a Leap Year on not. Among the maths which has featured through the week, the children really enjoyed playing some of the new strategy games which were introduced. In particular, the ‘Got It’ game was very popular.

Year 4 'leapt' into Maths Week on Monday 29th February - 'Leap' Day! The morning started with our Physical session, where the children did 29 of every exercise! They sorted facts about changing the calendar to suit the time taken for the earth to orbit the sun. After finding lots of ways to find a total of 29, the children made word problems to include the four operations. The focus for Tuesday was open-ended maths investigations which involved team work, peer support and strategic thinking.

'Estimation Guesstimation' was the heading for Wednesday. The children found different ways to estimate and measure length. How could they measure the hall with just a handful of 2p coins? How could they make a 'friend chain' to measure the perimeter of the playground? The end of the week led into 'Magical Measuring', where the Year 4 witches and wizards worked through various Measuring activities.

Throughout the week the children considered how to show they are mathematicians and researched some famous mathematicians from the past.