We held our third annual Nrich Maths Fair during activities week. Students in the primary classes delved into exciting mathematical enrichment activities throughout the morning and were supported by students from Years 7, 8, 9 and 10. There was a real buzz in the classrooms as the secondary students encouraged and guided the younger students to solve a range of puzzles and problems. Everyone had great fun completing each of their challenges. Read on to hear about the mathematical tasks that different groups investigated.

Assembly - Estimation

Later in the morning, the primary and secondary students gathered together in the hall for an assembly, thinking about what ‘Estimation’ means to them. Homa and Leila immediately raised their hands and commented enthusiastically, “It’s a smart guess,”.

Marta gave an interesting, clear presentation about how the body can be used to estimate lengths. E.g. a handspan is approximately 20cm, a foot length is about 30 cm and the width of a fingernail is roughly 1 cm.

Some of the secondary students supported the assembly by leading a few Estimating Challenges with different age groups. This included Eva and Poppy who asked Lana to guess the number of 1p coins in three different containers. She made very good estimates!

The ‘Lighter or Heavier’ than a 500g bag of sugar challenge with the reception students, led by Nieve proved successful too.

Dotty and Koko then asked some KS2 students to volunteer for the shampoo challenge. Elodie, Bhodi and Leila made very close estimates to the actual quantities.

Lastly, Alex in Year 9 led the estimating of the price of supermarket goods challenge with Atlas and Bobby. Needless to say, their estimates for the price of a large bar of chocolate were the closest! It was more challenging estimating the price of a box of pasta….

Maths Challenges

Mrs Pulford organised the Nrich Primary Mathematics Fair activities in each of the classes. There was a range of activities including some interactive maths games. A real enthusiasm for maths was felt in the primary classes as the students completed their rotation of challenges including: biscuit decorations, seesaw shenanigans, cover the camel, jigsaw 100, tandems, teddy town tasks, quadrilaterals, designing pentominoes houses, and dicey operations. The activities were led by the very able senior students who did a fabulous job in supporting them. The students immersed themselves, putting their problem-solving skills to the test and really enjoyed most of the tasks set.

Maths is great at Landmark!

Here are some of the teachers and students thoughts about this year’s Nrich Maths Fair and why they enjoyed the morning:

The Kingfisher class really loved playing the maths games with the senior students. They said, “We loved the biscuit activity and the spider game the best.” The students helped us and we had a lot of fun!

Robin students collectively remarked, “ It was brilliant. The students were amazing. They could help us less!!”

Toucan students added, “I liked participating in the assembly. I liked all of it. I liked the examples of estimates.”

Martina (Year 7) commented, “The children in Kingfisher liked moving the animals from Seesaw Shenanigans on the interactive board.”

Dawud (Year 7) said, “Toucan did brilliantly with the drawing of quadrilaterals in a circle and they knew names of lots of the shapes.”

Jens (Year 7) remarked, “The Year 6s were very good at listening. They were excellent at drawing the different pentominoes homes and finding the number in the Elimination game.’’