Are you ready to play Maths Week Bingo? A fun way to keep track of all your Maths Week activities. How many activities can you complete? Can you complete a row across, down or diagonally? Or even the entire card! The middle is a free square, for an activity of your choice. Share updates of your activities on X or Facebook with the hashtag #MathsWeekScot.
Below you can find some tips and inspiration for each of the activities mentioned on the Maths Week Bingo sheet. We would love you to share with us what you get up to, so please feel free to post photos on X and Facebook with the hashtag #MathsWeekScot and tag us in. You can find us here:
Logic puzzles and code breaking are a fun way to practice your mathematical problem solving skills. We have a range of free puzzles, including logic puzzles and sudoku for different difficulty levels, code crackers and cryptography challenges. You can even try your hand at encrypting your own secret message.
Escape rooms offer many opportunities to use numeracy, maths and logic skills. We have several online escape rooms for you to choose from on our website, including Escape from Lochdonia Manor, Numberella, and some data-themed escape rooms. While these are listed under learning resources for schools, they are also suitable for home-educated children or can be enjoyed by families together.
During Maths Week, the Scottish Mathematical Council sets a Daily Challenge to test your numeracy, logic and creativity skills. They will be revealed on our Daily Challenge page each day, where you can also find the challenges from past years if you want to take it further.
Lots of games already include maths without you even realising it, such as reading numbers on dice, moving a playing piece forward spaces, or counting out cards. But there are some games specifically designed to practice certain maths skills.
We have some easy maths games for you to try that practice addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, place value and number recognition - and they can all be played with either dice or regular playing cards.
There's lots of maths involved when building with Lego, from counting bricks and selecting the right brick sizes, to the geometry, angles and symmetry involved in your builds. Check out our website for some maths themed Lego builds to get you started, such as our pentomino puzzle, Lego hearts, or DIY Lego symmetry puzzles. Or get creative with your Lego own building ideas.
Maths and art go hand in hand. Shapes, patterns, tessellation and symmetry lend themselves to getting creative, so why not get out your pens or paint and make some maths inspired art of your own. Check out our Maths Week Scotland art videos, to create shape mice or cityscapes, a tessellation fish pattern, or a symmetrical stained 'glass' window. Plus loads more art activities to choose from.
Number doodles are a fun way for children to gain more confidence in recognising and naming numbers. Older learners can also still have fun getting creative. Try your hand at recreating our doodles, or create your own - what can you turn each number in to?
Origami involves a lot of maths skills, including spatial awareness, fractions, lines and angles, symmetry and rotation. Fold an origami bookmark to accompany our Maths Tales theme, or learn how to fold an origami hexagon out of a sheet of A4 paper!
This exciting story-writing competition invites young authors in classes P1-7 to create a tale incorporating some maths elements. Open to families and home-educated children, as well as schools. The deadline to enter is Friday 11 October at 6pm.
A haiku consists of seventeen syllables, arranged in three lines in a 5-7-5 pattern. A pi-ku is a variation on haiku with a mathematical twist. Instead of the 5-7-5 haiku pattern, the syllables in a pi-ku follow the number of digits in the mathematical constant pi (π). Try your hand at writing your own pi-ku!
A zine (pronounced zeen, short for magazine) is a method of self publishing with the goal of sharing ideas, connecting with others, and expressing yourself. Create your own zine out of an A4 sheet of paper in just ten minutes! The resource on our website is aimed at secondary schools, but the activity can also be adapted for younger children and families (watch the folding video, then skip to slide 11 in the presentation).
Create a poster all about the important numbers that tell your own story. Work out numbers that are meaningful to you, such as:
Year of birth
Age
Height
Shoe size
Number of pets
Time you wake up
Number of letters in your name
What else can you think of?
Out & About
Go on a shape and/ or number hunt
A scavenger hunt is a great way to get out and about AND have some fun with maths. You could go on a Shape Hunt, looking for how many different shapes you can find in your neighbourhood, or you could go on a Number Hunt, and see what numbers you can find on houses, shops, road signs etc. Why not document what you find and share your photographs with us online!
We have a number of museums and galleries taking part in Maths Week Scotland this year, with events, exhibitions and maths trails across Scotland. You can find all our family and school events in our day-by-day What's guides, or you can browse all our events - including both in-person and online - in our events calendar.
If there are no events happening near you, why not visit your nearest museum, gallery of science centre and see what maths related things you can find. Or take part in one of our online events instead.
Glasgow Science Centre has lots of maths inspired activities in their 'GSC at Home' series
Other Activities
Read a maths or numeracy related book
There are so many ways to bring maths and numeracy to life for little ones. Sharing stories that feature numbers and counting, shapes and patterns, or other mathematical concepts can help to lay the foundations for a life-long love of maths.
Check out the Scottish Book Trust's suggestions for picture books that support numeracy, or check out the book review in the Families section of our website. We'd also love you to share your own favourite maths-themed picture books with us online.
A fun way to encourage a love of maths is by introducing children to maths through television shows and movies. We've rounded up a selection of shows and movies that are easily available to stream or rent online, which have some kind of maths connection. Some of the connections are more overt, others are more implied - because maths is everywhere! Browse our list and make your choices for a class viewing or family movie night:
Maths Inside is a photo competition open to everyone in Scotland, which encourages you to look for the maths in your daily lives and the world around you. There are three different categories to enter, and six different age levels, from pre-school children through to adults, so it's something for the whole family to get involved in.
You have until 11:59pm on Monday 30 September to submit your entries.
Use your maths skills to bake something. Did you know baking is one of the best activities you can do at home, that uses lots of different maths skills including:
Budgeting for ingredients
Weighing and measuring out ingredients
Doubling or halving a recipe to scale it up or down
Working out the volume of your baking tins
Sharing our mixture equally
Rolling dough in to circles, rectangles or other shapes
Timing your bakes
Find out more about learning maths through baking in our 'Ready, set bake!' blog post, or try your hand at our 'Pancake Maths' recipe!
To celebrate Book Week Scotland, we are delighted to announce the finalists and winners of our Maths Tales story-writing competition, run in partnership with Read Write Count with The First Minister.
