Middle School Maths Morning

As the rain clouds retreated, and the sun showed the promise of breaking through the thinning clouds, Years 5 and 6 came into school on Monday morning ready and raring to get started on the Middle School Maths Morning.

This is a morning packed to the brim with practical and stimulating maths challenges designed to test the Middle School children, in a hands-on way, on the full range of topics that they have been learning in their maths lessons.

The children were divided in ten mixed ability teams, all named after famous female mathematicians, and for the whole morning they moved between five very different maths activity stations. At one station their orienteering and measuring skills were put to the test as they attempted to follow a series of bearings in search of buried diamonds. At the Wacky Waters activity, they explored volume and capacity (and tried not to get soaked). On the Shape Chase they raced around the school, following a complex shape maths-loop, and learnt about lines of symmetry and all the other properties of 2D shapes. At the Estimation Agony outpost their estimating talents were stretched to the limit as they investigated a wide variety of approximation challenges. Then finally, at the Make that Number station, they worked in small groups using a small set of numbers to multiply, add, subtract and divide their way to series of much larger target numbers (similar to the TV show Countdown).

I was enormously impressed with the level of engagement and effort shown by all the children and how well they worked together supporting each other.

In the end it was Team Darden who won - named after Christina Darden, an American mathematician, data analyst, and aeronautical engineer who devoted much of her 40-year career in aerodynamics at NASA to researching supersonic flight.

Congratulations to all the children for a fun-filled and exciting morning of maths.