Maths and Play

An important aspect of our ALiM (Accelerated Learning in Mathematics) project was incorporating maths into play. There are many ways to include maths in everyday activities. Here are a few that we tried...

When we worked together to make Stone Soup there were lots of opportunities for measuring, weighing, and discussing fractions.

During our Matariki celebrations we made pancakes, which gave more opportunities chance to practise our measuring and fractions.

We looked at the weight of common pantry/ grocery items. The children had to find the weight on the packing and then sort the packages in weight order. This is something adults do automatically but the children hadn't looked at these numbers before. Since this lesson, there's been a lot of interest in examining lunch-boxes to see what things weigh.

During our Matariki celebrations we practised our geometry and fractions skills as we made kites.

Making harakeke flowers for Matariki also gave the chance to look at repeating patterns and rotation of patterns.

We participated in the NZ Garden Bird Survey. This gave lots of practise with collecting and recording information. It also inspired a number of Rua students to undertake their own bird surveys during free play.

The Bird Survey then transferred to classroom learning as the students experimented with displaying and analysing information

Finally our spy-themed morning in August required lots of fun maths. For example to crack the code and work out the secret message.

Or to solve the problems and work out the code to open the lock.















I hope these examples give you some inspiration to include maths in everyday activities.