MATHS WEEK

Alice in Numberland!

It's maths week! Our learning has been inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland this week. As well as being an author, Carroll was also a maths teacher so there is lots of maths involved throughout the whole story!

On Monday, we made plates for the Mad Hatter's tea party and thought carefully about reflecting in all four quadrants.

As the Queen of Hearts had playing cards for guards, our maths today has involved cards! First, we investigated the probability of choosing different cards from a deck of cards. We also used the cards to generate some numbers to multiply!

This afternoon, Miss Halton taught us how to play 'Stop the Bus' which is a card game in which you have to race to get 31. It was great fun!

Our final maths event of the day was a visit from Barney the mathsmagician! We took part in lots of different investigations which really got us feeling enthusiastic about maths.

Can you draw this shape without taking your pencil off the page?

If not, why not?

We investigated how to get the frogs to the right lilypad! Below is a simpler version - can you solve the puzzle? Is there a method?

 Here we are matching 2D and 3D shapes with natural or manmade shapes in the real world! 

The poison coin! We had to work out how to each take one, two or three coins in turn without ending up with the poison coin. We realised there is a trick to make sure you win!

Barney finished by explaining the maths behind the investigations we solved. A big thankyou to him for coming into school to amaze us with some maths!

What maths are you going to amaze your family with tonight?

Maths Week - So far.......

This week is Maths Week at school and we have based most of our work around a book called 'The Rabbit Problem' by Emily Gravett.

We started by investigating Fibonacci's Rabbit Problem, which the book is based upon. We had to look for patterns in the numbers.

As the week has continued we have worked on other problems from the book, including fraction problems and carrot coordinates. We had to find out who stole the carrots. 

To combine Art and Maths we designed some pictures using 'Tangrams'.

We even managed to make some rabbits!

On Tuesday we also had a visit from Barney the Mathsmagician. We got to carry out lots of different investigations.

Outdoor Maths!

We had a great time in year one this afternoon! We went outside and completed a variety of different maths challenges as part of our maths week.

Measuring the width of tree trunks using string

 The children counted trees, measured the length of the playground using steps, made 2D shapes, measured the width of tree trunks and hunted for rectangles!

Making 2D shapes

Making 2D shapes

The children also hunted for minibeasts but there weren't many around!

How many?

Today we started Maths Week with lots of fun activities to do with estimating!

We have a jar of jelly beans in the classroom and the children were asked to estimate how many they think are in the jar. The children will be allowed to change their estimates over the next few days to see if their estimating skills have improved!

We then discussed some 'I wonder questions' such as...
I wonder how many books are the classroom?
I wonder how many pens are in the room?
I wonder how many chairs there are in the school?
I wonder how many children have ever been in our classroom?

We discussed that some of the answers we could find out easily whilst others were bit more difficult. Finally, we decided to investigate how many pockets are in the classroom. We started off by making estimates. Then we discussed our estimates in groups and gave reasons for our thinking.

'I think there are 64 because most people have two pockets and there are 32 children in the class,'
'I think there are 78 because some people have two pockets but some children have four or five.'
'I think there are 40 because some people have no pockets.'

Each group then counted the pockets for the children at their table and thought about whether this changed their estimates. We decided to include the adults to make it a bit more challenging! 

How many pockets do you think we had? (answers at the bottom at this blog!)

Our final activity was to estimate a variety of objects found in and around school. The children were allowed to look but not touch and only had a few minutes at each table.

 

How many pens?
How many sticky labels? (Not rolls but labels on each roll!)

How many vehicles?

How many paperclips?

Some objects were easier to estimate than others. The children found the bigger objects easier to estimate and those that had fewer items.

There were some close estimates but quite a lot of surprises too!

Our class books were based on millions! 

We saw pictures showing a million jelly beans and a million stars!

We also read lots of interesting facts about millions, billions and trillions!

What was your favourite fact?

Answers

There were...

101 pockets in the classroom

500 labels sticky labels

100 whiteboard pens

76 vehicles

and 1000 paperclips

 Jelly beans to be revealed later in the week!

Canopic Jars

As part of out topic on the Ancient Egyptians, we have been making our own Canopic Jars!

After discovering what the jars looked like and how they were used,  we planned our own designs, thinking carefully and shape and pattern. 

To make the jars we covered long tubes with paper to give them some shape and we then used papier mache to make them strong. We smoothed out any lumps and bumps with paint brushes!

Once the papier mache layer had dried, we covered the jars with layers of white tissue paper. This helped give the pots a smooth finish and will make it easier to paint them.

The next steps include painting the jars, marking them with hieroglyphics and making the animal head to go on the lid.