Have fun with Maths during summer time!

Studies show kids' math skills will deteriorate over the summer. In fact, children typically lose an estimated 2.5 months of learning over the break. The good news is, it’s easy to help your children avoid backsliding so they can hit the ground running next school year. Learning math under the sun can be a blast for kids. Here are five fun ways to keep math top of mind for your children as they soak up the rays:

1. Ponder the Kiddie Pool. The same kids who probably can’t wait to dip their toes into the kiddie pool also need to cultivate the important and difficult skill of estimation. Before they wade in have them guess the gallons of water it’ll take to fill the pool past their ankles. How close did they come? For additional opportunities to measure consider throwing a graduated cylinder into the mix of water toys. Older kids can join the fun too. Challenge them to calculate the circumference, diameter and radius of the pool. Divide the circumference of the circle by the diameter to find pi. As the water flows this summer so do the opportunities to teach your children math.
2. Grow a Math Garden. Your garden isn’t only teaming with life but opportunities to teach children math. For example, how much water and fertilizer will be needed to nourish the garden? How many pounds of fruit and vegetables the garden will produce? Or, pick one vegetable or flower to measure its growth over the summer and chart its progress. For older kids, you can overlay the garden with a grid to easily measure the square footage. Teach children how to multiply one of the side rows by the bottom row to determine the total number of squares.
3. Keep Score. The next time you take your kids to the ball park encourage them to keep score. For younger children, you can use popcorn as a visual to aid in learning. You can kick it up a notch for the older kids by teaching them how to calculate a batting average.
4. Bike and Boost Math Ability. You can power your children’s math abilities as they pedal their bikes this summer. You can teach kids how to calculate their “revolutions per minute” or RPMs through counting. Each time their right knee comes to the top of a stroke within a 15 second period is a measure of their RPMs. Keep time while they count. Don’t forget to pack in one last lesson as you pump up the tires. What a perfect time to introduce the concept of pressure per square inch or PSI.
5. Feed the Birds and the Brain. Hang up a bird feeder and let the learning begin. How much bird food will it take to fill the feeder? How often will it need to be refilled? Collect data about the types of birds that visit the feeder. Add the number of birds on a given day and calculate the differences day to day. How many more or less visited yesterday versus today? If 10 birds ate from the feeder and two were Finches what percentage of the birds were Finches? 

Math doesn’t have to go out the window as kids play outside this summer. If you make math apart of the fun, it’ll be meaningful and memorable.

Primary Maths Day - 16th of May

Math Up the Olympics! Part 2

Discuss Decimals and Fractions Many Olympic medals are won or lost by tiny increments of time, distance, or points. In the 2004 games, for instance, Dwight Phillips (USA) won the men's long jump with a leap of 8.59m, while second place went to John Moffitt (USA) with a distance of 8.47m. Use figures like these to explain how decimals relate to fractions: 0.59m is the same thing as 59/100m.
Slip in an introduction to precision in measurement while talking to your child. Explain how the Olympic Games have changed throughout their history because of improvements in technology. Just fifty years ago, for example, stopwatches could only measure time up to an accuracy of 0.1 seconds—so if two runners finished a race within 0.1 seconds of each other, it was impossible to determine which athlete had the faster time. Today, computers are used instead of stopwatches—and they can measure time up to an accuracy of 0.001 seconds. That's a hundred times more precise, and it makes it much easier to know who's really won an event.  

Go Over Graphing Choose a sport, athlete, or country to follow over the course of the Olympic Games, and use the data you and your child collect in order to create a graph. For instance, your child can compile a graph demonstrating how many medals are won by any country on each day of the games. Or, create a graph showing the best daily scores that are recorded in a particular event. Talk to your kids about how graphs make it easy to see the overall trend of a person's or a country's achievements. You might also point out how a graph can clearly reflect an upper limit on human abilities. (No one is ever going to be able to swim the 100-meter backstroke in just 20 seconds, for example, and that particular point on the graph would therefore be very far away from the line showing the best times.)

Math Up the Olympics! Part 1

As athletes from around the world gather for the upcoming Olympic Games, it's the perfect moment to capture your child's interest in the exciting events that are about to take place – and take advantage of that interest to introduce some related mathematical concepts.
None of these activities will even cause you to break a sweat, but they will allow you to have fun with your children as you watch the games, read about them, and—perhaps—win gold medals for your amazingly quick calculations. Just don't blame us if by the end of it all you're planning a family vacation to the next Olympics!

Practice Converting Measurements Since the Olympics are an international event, distances and speeds are measured using the metric system. It can be difficult for a child to grasp the concept that people around the world use different units of measurement for the same thing, so the concrete examples of the Olympics provide the perfect way to illustrate how this works.
First, explain to your child that 1 meter is equal to 3.28 feet. That means that, for instance, the 100-meter dash is equivalent to a run of about 328 feet. Challenge your child to convert the following distance events into feet:

• When divers plunge into a pool from a board that's 10 meters high, the distance between them and the water is how many feet? (33 ft.)  
• When speed skaters complete a 500 meter race, how many feet have they skated? (1640 ft.)

Your child can also try out some currency conversions! He'll boost his research skills as he determines the current exchange rate for the Olympics host country, and practice a little math calculating how many of that currency he can get for 10 U.S. dollars.

Money Skills for Kids - 3rd Grade activity

Once your third grader has mastered counting coins up to $1.00, in school he'll begin to working numbers that make up larger dollar amounts. Chances are, he'll want to go to a store and make a purchase using his own allowance and savings. In which case, he will need to know what bills and coins he'll need to make his purchase. And when it comes to numbers, practice makes perfect. This activity will not only help him practice his math skills, like counting and addition and subtraction, but it will also give him a chance to learn more about things like purchasing and money exchange, which are important concepts to learn as he grows up.

What You Need:
•Collection of several old greeting cards (or you can make your own)
•Dollar bills and coins (5 one dollar bills and several of each coins (half-dollars, quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies)
•Unlined paper to make your cards and markers to decorate you them (if you make them yourself)
•Several shoppers and one cashier

What You Do:
1.Begin this activity with a warm up. Show your child a greeting card, toy or book and state the price. Have him arrange his bills and show what he would use to buy the card. Provide him with assistance if needed. Challenge him to come up with different dollar and coin combinations to reach the same amount.

2.You will need to either collect (you can use cards that are already used) or make a collection of greeting cards and write prices ranging from one to five dollars on the backs of the items. If you decide to make your own greeting cards, have your child make cards for various occasions using the unlined paper. Be sure he writes the prices on the backs. When the cards are completed, display them on a table for a "shopper" to browse the selection.

3.Choose one person to be the cashier for the card shop and at least one more person to be a shopper. Recruit Moms, Dads, siblings, grandparents, etc. to shop or take turns being the cashier in the card shop. Each person will select a greeting card and will give the cashier the appropriate number of bills and coins. The cashier should check that the amount is correct. You may want to have the shopper count the dollars and coins aloud for the cashier. (Everyone will most likely need to share the same money and use it more than once for multiple purchases.)

4.Allow your third grader to take turns playing both the role of the cashier and the shopper.
You can also do this activity with things other than greeting cards. A collection of baseball cards, for example, or any toys you have lying around the house. Just be sure not to write the prices on anything that you wouldn't want to be written on! A small piece of paper with the price will work just fine, if you prefer. This activity will allow your child to practice his counting skills and prepare him to make purchases on his own the next time you travel to the store together. You may be surprised at his new found confidence and purchasing skills!

Build Newspaper Towers...and Test Their Stability! 5th Grade Activity

As your young learner studies structures, he may hear that the strongest shape is the triangle. Put this architectural idea to the test by building two different newspaper towers with your child. He'll test and observe each structure's stability…trying his hand at engineering as he explores this important architectural concept.

What You Need:
Newspapers
Masking tape
Heavy desk stapler
Large paper plate
Pennies

What You Need:
Your child will be building two towers, one made out of cubes (horizontals and verticals) and the other consisting of triangles (cubes with diagonal braces). Each tower will be two cubes tall. Start by helping your child roll newspaper into tubes. Take one sheet of newspaper, folded so that you see one full page. Roll from a short side, making a tube approximately one inch thick. Tape. Make 20 for each tower.

Using staples and tape, help your child make a cube. Take 8 more newspaper tubes, and build a second cube on top of the first. Reinforce the joints with tape. You have completed one tower, two cubes tall. Repeat step 2 to build the second tower.

The braces are also of rolled newspaper but need to be slightly longer than the original tubes. Take one sheet of newspaper, folded so that you see one page and fold this page in half, top to bottom. Roll from one corner to other. Tape. Make 11 braces.

Staple or tape one of these braces diagonally across each side, the top and the base of the bottom cube in the second tower. Repeat the process with the four sides and the top of the upper cube.

Carefully stand the towers upright. Do they both stand easily? It may take some shifting to get the one without braces to remain upright. Place a paper plate on each tower. Add pennies until one tower topples. Which one turned out to be strongest? Why does he think that is?

Great Maths Websites

The links below are some great sites for the children to practice their maths skills:


http://www.aaamath.com/


http://www.coolmath4kids.com/


http://www.mathcats.com/explore.html


http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/websites/4_11/site/numeracy.shtml


http://www.funbrain.com/numbers.html