Tips and ideas for families to get involved with Maths Week Scotland
There's lots to do for families during Maths Week Scotland, from the events, activities and challenges you can find on our website, to getting busy with maths inspired games, arts, books and baking at home.
We've created a wee booklet for you, which you can print out below and fill in as a memento of your Maths Week Scotland. It includes a section to write about yourself, a list to check off all the things you've done, and a couple of brain teasers to get you in the mood for maths.
Just print off the A4 sheet and fold it in half twice to make a mini booklet. For anyone who needs bigger print, there's also a large print version with 4 individual pages of A4 each.
Below you can find some tips and inspiration for each of the activities mentioned in the booklet. We'd love you to share with us what you've got up to, so please feel free to post photos on Twitter and Facebook and tag us in. You can find us here:
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 events in our day-by-day What's On for Families? guide, 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.
Take a picture for the Maths Inside photography competition
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 2 October to submit your entries.
The Scottish Mathematical Council has devised a whole new set of puzzles to challenge your numeracy, logic and creativity skills, which we will be sharing with you each day from 25 September to 1 October.
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 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!
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!
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. You'll also find an idea for creating your own symmetry puzzles out of Lego.
Maths and art go hand in hand. Shapes, pattern 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 geometric drawings or numerical doodles. There's also the Maths Makes Art video series by Johanna Hall and Anne McNaught, two of this year's Small Grant Fund winners, who show you how to have fun with symmetry, cubes and tessellation.
#ShowYourWorking is a social media campaign which aims to highlight the importance of maths across the entire workforce by showcasing real-life examples of how elements of the mathematics curriculum are used in practice.
This is a great opportunity for parents and carers to open up conversations about maths and how we use it in our everyday lives. You could:
Start a discussion with your child around the types of jobs they think typically use maths. Encourage them to think about jobs they might not have thought of and how a range of roles use maths in their everyday work.
Work together to identify areas of maths that are used at home. This could be measuring ingredients for a cake, planning the weekly shopping budget or calculating how much wallpaper will be needed to redecorate the living room. There are examples all around you!
Use this as an opportunity to talk about your own job and how you use maths in your role.
Share your examples of how you use maths in your job or around the home and help bring maths to life by posting your examples to social media using #ShowYourWorking
Brain Teaser Solutions
If you're looking for the solutions to the brain teaser puzzles in the booklet, we've posted them on a separate page to avoid any spoilers.
It's Spring in Edinburgh means, which means the return of the Edinburgh Science Festival (30 March - 14 April)! This years theme is Shaping the Future, and we've browsed through the programme to pick out some of our maths highlights for you.
To mark World Meteorological Day (23 March), we are delighted to share a guest post from Professor Sylvia Knight, Head of Education at the Royal Meteorological Society, to introduce their new Climate Change Concept tool and show how teachers can use it to support maths in the curriculum.
