Smarties and maths

The Smarties maths challenge was good fun and the Y2s use good questioning and thinking skills as they brainstormed questions and then worked in pairs to find the answers.  Some example questions were: how many Smarites in our box? Is there the same number in each box? Are there always the same number of each colour? If not, which colour do we have the most of? Can my Smarites be shared equally into two groups, 3 groups etc. How much does one Smartie weigh? 

Once they had answered lots of their  questions they made a bar graph of their results and then we recorded everyones findings in a table. We found out that the colour we all had the most of was pink. That the number of Smarites in each box does seem to vary. The smallest number was 39 and the biggest 47 (are we sure all the eating happened at the end?!). It was great to see lots of discussion about what makes an interesting question and many examples of good cooperation to find the answers.

Inventing patterns for our necklaces

When we were thinking about Grace's colourful African dress we had the idea that she would look nice with a bring necklace too! Using our skills from maths and the pattern and sequence work we've done we invented a pattern with beads. We threaded our bead pattern onto a length of ribbon and repeated it many times. Some of our patterns were complicated and we had to work with lots of concentration to repeat them carefully. Do you like our bright necklaces?

 

Numbers

Today some of us had a go at this maths task. It was good fun so some of the children asked it they could try at home.
http://nrich.maths.org/content/id/6343/2Dtargets.swf

Cuisenaire Rods - so you can have a go at home

This week we have been enjoying using the cuisenaire rods to help with our maths thinking. Click here to have a go with them via the Nrich site!

Tessellating pattern blocks

In our 'Power of Reading' book - Grace and Family, Grace goes to visit her Papa in The Gambia. The illustrations show wonderful patterns and colours in the African cloth at the market and in the fabric shop. Grace and her Nana have African dresses especially made for them. In class we will be designing our own African prints. To warm-up for this, and to link with our work on 2D shapes, we created tessellations using the pattern blocks.  Do you like our patterns?

Pattern blocks

One of our tasks this week on the theme of shape has been to use the pattern blocks. We have found different ways to fit pattern blocks together to fill in pictures. Some of us made a graph showing how many of each shape we used. We learnt the names of some new shapes.
Trapezium

Diamond 

Hexagon

Here are two pictures of us working:

Maths with Cuisenaire rods and Numicon

Year 2 have been using the Cuisenaire rods to work on multiplication:

and Numicon!

"No, they're meant to be all the same colour!"

This week, Year 2 have been looking at different 2D and 3D shapes and their properties. Today we decided to make a painting using 2D shapes inspired by the artist Kandinsky.