Education News

Right up Your Street

Education News from Alleyn's | www.alleyns.org.uk

Aidan Sproat-Clements, maths teacher, author of maths text books, and Director of Studies at Alleyn’s School, talks about the maths you might be able to find on the school run.

Maths in the real world

Relating maths to the real world is a great way of helping children to find it enjoyable. Simple games when you are out and about can be effective ways to pass the time and practise shape knowledge. Questions such as “Can you find a window that’s shaped like a triangle?” will engage your child both with their surroundings and with key mathematical definitions. Particularly with the rich and interesting Victorian architecture that can be found around here, there are plenty of opportunities to look for squares, rectangles, trapezia and rhombuses in the intricate mouldings around windows and front doors.

Windows of opportunity

Windows, especially those divided into small panes, offer lots of opportunities for counting practice, and for multiplication practice, too – how many panes would make up a window that is seven panes tall and four panes wide? You can also ask these questions in reverse to help check that children know their times tables thoroughly – “if I can see a window with 28 panes, what dimensions could it be?”.

Open minds lead to open doors

Door numbers can also be a great way to practise mathematical skills – especially because of the different ways in which roads can be numbered. Odds on one side and evens on the other? Try to predict the number that will be four houses away. Or simply add up the numbers as you go along. It is a satisfying fact that adding up odd numbers starting at 1 always yields a square number: 1 + 3 = 4 = 22, 1 + 3 + 5 = 9 = 32, 1 + 3 + 5 + 7 = 16 = 42 and so on. These are the sorts of patterns that older children might be able to spot. How far down the street can they get before the speed at which they are passing houses is faster than the speed at which they can add numbers together?

Mixing and matching

There are plenty of other ways to mix up the problems depending on the journey you take – adding up only houses with red front doors, for example, or if you happen to travel past semidetached houses on your route, finding the total for each pair. Multiplication can increase in difficulty very quickly – perhaps for each building, your budding mathematicians could multiply the number of floors by the house number.

Keeping their brains ticking over

As with so many learning activities, the actual sums you are doing aren’t especially important. What matters is that brains are being kept alert and that numerical and observational skills continue to be honed.

For more ideas about some of the patterns that can be found in house numbers, check out

www.nrich.maths.org/housenumbers