Where is Mathematics?
- Miss Wygnanska on Mathematics at our Junior School
I have just come across a group of Year 1 pupils outside my classroom counting the rectangles on the doors. One girl also spotted little squares in the fireproof glass of the window pane, and a circle on the door handle. This sight has become a familiar one around the Junior School as pupils participate in the Mathematics Trail as part of this week’s Mathematics Week.
The theme this year is ‘Mathematics in Nature’ and it has been wonderful to see children outside taking photographs, measuring trees and hunting for shapes and patterns. The aim has been for the girls to spend a little bit of time noticing all of the everyday places in which they will find evidence of Mathematics principles. When they ask how much of playtime is left, how long ago the Romans lived, or how many species of animals live in the rainforest, they are encountering Mathematics – and there isn’t a single textbook or calculator in sight!
The Creative Curriculum at St Mary’s Junior School, Cambridge allows teachers the flexibility in the way we communicate with the pupils the skills they will need to reach their potential in Mathematics and school examinations. What’s more, we are also able to help the children take a step back and realise the real-world value of Mathematics, which is all around us. By fostering an appreciation for Mathematics at a young age, we are developing a generation of girls who can then go on to use this viewpoint and the skill they have acquired in a variety of careers and applications in later life – and not only use the skills, but enjoy doing so too!
THE ANSWER THEN TO ‘WHERE IS MATHEMATICS?’ IS, OF COURSE, EVERYWHERE!
Reception
As part of Mathematics Week the Reception class looked at the shapes of different leaves and the girls used them to make leaf pictures of their own. The group read a book called Leaf Man for inspiration, giving the girls ideas for their pictures.
Year 1
Year 1 pupils collected a lot of leaves from the school garden, estimated how many there might be and then counted them out – finding that there were exactly 100 leaves! The girls then sorted the leaves into groups according to their properties, such as colour or shape using Venn diagrams. They also drew around the leaves to ascertain whether they were symmetrical or not.
Year 2
Our Year 2 pupils have been looking for shapes, symmetry and tessellation patterns outdoors this week – and then making their own shapes and patterns using objects from the garden.
Year 3
The Year 3 girls had an adventure around the Junior School this week as they followed the Mathematics Trail. The pupils had to answer the set questions and follow the map to the finish. The girls enjoyed using natural objects to illustrate shape and numbers – pictured below.
Year 4
Year 4 has also taken up the Mathematics Trail around school and the girls had a good go at answering the various challenges. It was great fun!
Year 5
Year 5 pupils are creating mathematical guides to Coe Fen. There will be several guides aimed at different ages with fun mathematical facts and questions. The girls have spent several hours measuring trees, perimeters and estimating the number of leaves on trees around the fen – having a great time doing so!
Year 6
Year 6 pupils have been looking at sequences this week and how the Fibonacci sequence appears in nature. They have been eagle-eyed in spotting lots of examples, including pine cones and a pair of snails resting in a tree. The group then used the Fibonacci sequence to build up patterns and create spirals in their Mathematics books, some of which were so large that the girls needed extra paper!
A word from Assistant Head Mr O’Reilly on Mathematics
I remember my own primary school Mathematics lessons with a sense of dread. From the very start we worked our way through workbooks, only receiving guidance from the teacher when they gave us permission to move on to the next, equally dull, workbook. As a result I saw the subject in a very pointless, intangible and academic way which had little to do with everyday life. A Mathematics Week, like the one we are currently celebrating, would have been unimaginable and for this reason I felt at the time that Mathematics was hard and not suited to my ‘artistic’ brain. No doubt I would have benefited enormously from efforts made to show Mathematics in the light of the ‘real world’, through concrete objects and practical applications – but there was sadly very little of this in our teaching and learning.
Oh how the teaching of Mathematics has moved on! As teachers we now have a much greater awareness of how children learn and the need for Mathematics (and all other subjects) to be fun, engaging and practical – so that children have a real chance to understand the relevance of the subject, and enjoy it! For too long Mathematics has been seen as a ‘difficult’ subject, including to my younger self, which you either ‘get’ or ‘don’t get’. It is often seen as perfectly acceptable to say that you ‘can’t do Mathematics’. I hope that we can all agree that this negative thinking, and these old fashioned teaching methods, are unhelpful in the campaign to engage children with Mathematics in more positive ways. Instead, we should be asking children to work out the change at the shops, to count the number of red cars on a trip to school or to work out the five times tables on a long car journey. To quote Pythagoras, “numbers rule the universe”; the more we engage positively with this essential discipline the better our children will perform in it, and enjoy it!