Pupils from Reception to Year 6 got stuck into a week of mathematical brain teasers and scientific discovery this week, beginning with a Maths Monday challenge and continuing throughout the week with special Science activities.
Maths Monday posed the question ‘How many marbles do we need to fill…’ to every year group from Reception up, asking the children to estimate how many marbles are needed to fill various containers or spaces adjusted according to the age of each group. While Reception enjoyed working out how many pom poms could fit in a jar and Year 1 looked at how many marbles would fill a dolls house, pupils from Years 2-6 tackled the challenge of calculating how many marbles would fill a classroom. With the various mechanisms and formulas ranging from L x W x H to pi, there were plenty of creative solutions and much delight as the children found out how other year groups approached the problem.
Year 2 pupil Tatsu explained how his group worked together to calculate the number of marbles needed to fill a marble jar and from there, the classroom itself: “We tried to do 14 x 3, and then 14 + 14 is 28. So 28 + 14 = 42, and then we timesed it by 1000 and got 42,000!”
Junior School Director of Studies, Lucy Kirkland said: “We use Maths Mondays as a fun way to work on children’s resilience in Maths. We choose fairly open-ended questions that require the children to think creatively, use what they already know and apply their learning to the real world. Previous questions have included: ‘What are there more of in the world – wheels or doors?’ and ‘How many legs are there in the junior school?’ Whatever the question, each year the children enter into the challenge with 100% enthusiasm and determination, and demonstrate how their mathematical learning can be applied to real-world problems.”
