Maths, M&Ms and many-sided shapes!

Upper Primary celebrated Maths Day 2019 with a carousel of activities in our year groups, with topics ranging from shapes with a high number of sides (up to 70), solving the Four-Fours problem and investigating tangram puzzles.

In Year Five, the children learned about shapes such as tricontagons (30 sides) and heptacontagons (70 sides) by using a variety of sticks to investigate the properties of the shape, conducted a treasure hunt outside and produced some psychedelic shapes with spirographs.

Year Six children got very competitive in their quest to solve the ‘Four Fours’ problem, in which they had to make the numbers from 1-25 using only “four fours”. There were some creative answers including using cubes, square roots and factorials. As an example, ‘1’ can be made thus: (4 ÷ 4) x (4 ÷ 4). Can you find a way to make 2?

Year Six also investigated the value of Pi, producing ‘Manhattan graphs’ to visually represent the digits beyond the standard ‘3.142’ as well as an investigation challenge where they raced against each other to compete as many investigation problems in as short a time as possible.

Outside of the classroom, we had the ‘Angle Shootout Competition’, in which children had to take a series of penalties from ever tighter angles, with a miss leading to their elimination. This was won by Mark Watson from an angle of 45 degrees! Well done Mark!

We also had an estimation challenge, where children had to guess the total number of dice in a tray. The winning guesses were from Klara Helgesson, Chae Won Park and Hae Won park who all guessed 350 from an actual total of 347.

A sudden-death decider saw Chae Won come out on top, guessing that 100 children took part in the competition (actual total 101!) with Hae Won and Klara guessing within 5 children too! They were all the winners of some chocolatey goodies.

Friday afternoon saw us in the Domes with a slightly unusual assembly. The children spent the afternoon visiting 8 different stalls run by teachers. They looked at ratios by eating M&Ms, robotics, probability, counting in a foreign language, singing and dancing with numbers and Cubism drawing. A massive thank you to all of the teachers for their hard work, but also to the children for engaging so wonderfully during the afternoon.

Written by James Ferran, Krylatskoe Upper Campus Maths Coordinator