Maths All About Us - four fun maths activities

What is it:
An A4 sheet with 4 maths activities for Lower KS2.
Four fun open-ended, group-work maths based activities designed for the start of the year as you get to know your class and they get to know each other. Prompt questions to initiate child-led investigations that encourage the children to discuss mathematical concepts and get to know each other better.

Who is it for:
Primary Lower KS2 (Year 3 and Year 4)
Designed to be open-ended and accessible to all, whilst also providing opportunity to extend and stretch!

How to use it:
Designed to be used flexibly to suit you and your class.
Display it on the board or print it off and hand out to small groups of children.
Use as an A4 sheet or cut into 4 different activities.
Choose one activity for the class to focus, let the children choose or set up as a carousel of activities.

When is it for:
Designed for the beginning of the year as you get to know your class and they get to know you. An introductory first day activity. Find out about each other via maths!

Why use it:
It’s fun, open-ended, child-led, group focused. These activities encourage children to discuss and explore maths, to investigate and ask questions.

What maths is explored:

Number Facts - Numbers and counting. A fun easy activity that encourages lots of discussion amongst the children and highlights that numbers are everywhere and all around us. A real ice-breaker for the first day!

Body Facts - Addition and multiplication. explore the maths of our bodies. Children add, double and multiply to find how many eyes, ears, noses, legs and bones there are in the classroom. Allow the children to explore different ways to calculate and record. Pause the class, share different methods and demonstrate different ways to multiply numbers such as the grid method and use of place value knowledge.

Dates and Days - Time. Explore the months of the year, days of the week and units of time. Convert between years, months, weeks and days. Children learn how many seconds in a minute, minutes in an hour and hours in a day.

Popular Pets - Data handling. Another activity that encourages lots of discussion and finding out information about class mates. Children can ask questions, create tallies and think about how to display the information. Pause the class and discuss tallies, frequency tables, pictograms and bar charts.