Activities to try at home

Lots of activities in and around the home can support mathematical understanding. Incorporating maths activities into your daily routine will encourage children to be inquisitive and confident mathematicians. Here are a few ideas to get you started.

1 - Meal Times

Food preparation, cooking and serving provides a wealth of opportunities to measure, counting, using ratios and exploring time. 

2 - Talking About the Weather

Younger children might want to keep a weather chart and log how many sunny, rainy, windy etc days we have had. Older children might be able to record temperatures and calculate the difference between one day to the next. 

3 - Playing and Watching Sports

With our youngest children, we might play games to see how many passes we can do before the ball drops. Older children might introduce the concept of time and see how many passes they can do in 1 minute. Keeping track of scores in tally charts and tables is a great introduction to statistics!

When watching sports, we could introduce the language of position and direction (in front, behind, through) with younger children. Older children might begin to discuss probability and strategy. E.g. The rugby player could try for a drop-goal because then the score will be tied.

4. On a Walk or in the Car
Can children spot numerals around them? Can they subitise (recognise and say without counting) the number of birds they see? Who can see a double on a licence plate?

5. Story Time

Use story books to discuss positional language to help children learn about shape, space and position. E.g. 'Teddy is under the chair.' Older children could calculate how long it will take them to finish their book if they read 5 pages a day.

6. Card Games and Board Games

Playing snap and pairs with young children can introduce them to the concepts of matching and sorting.  Board games offer a plethora of opportunities to work on mathematical concepts in an engaging way. E.g. Monopoly encourages children to work with different amounts of money,  Four in a Row encourages children to thing about position and direction as well as improving their subitising.

Please share any activities you get up to with your child's teacher on Class Dojo via their portfolio. We would love to see what you get up to!
 

Useful Websites
 

Please use the links below to find some useful websites that your child can access at home to support their maths learning. We would recommend using these sites a few times per week for between 5-15minutes.
 

If your child accesses these sites at home, please don't allow siblings, friends or family to answer for them but do support your child if they are stuck.

Times Tables Rock Stars (TTRS)

TTRS is a platform that helps children to boost their times tables knowledge.

NumBots

NumBots aim is to help every child achieve understanding, recall and fluency in mental addition and subtraction so that children can move from counting to calculating.

1 Minute Maths

A brilliant app that can be downloaded on the App Store, Google Play and Amazon Kindle that is useful for building number fluency and confidence.