Supporting Parents: Outdoor Maths
88% of children say their maths confidence improves when parents and carers become more involved in their learning.
As we move into the summer holidays it can be useful to have some learning opportunities up your sleeve to help keep your children’s numeracy skills ticking over, and to prepare them for the school year ahead. Getting outdoors provides a great opportunity to apply what your children have learnt in the classroom to real life situations and to discover fun, practical applications which strengthen their understanding.
Here are 9 ideas you can use during the summer hols to keep your kids interested in numbers when out and about:
1) Plan a picnic
- A summer picnic can be an amazing opportunity to play with numbers
- Reinforce addition and careful counting, as you pack the food
- Practise multiplication: 3 tomatoes each for 5 people. How many tomatoes do we need?
- Talk about fractions as you cut up the quiche: two quarters is the same as one half
2) Outdoor arrays
- Find things around the garden to make your own ‘array’ - a pictorial representation to help your children understand multiplication and division
- For example, 3 x 4 could be shown as three groups of four leaves. This makes twelve
- How else could you divide twelve? Six groups of two? Experiment with different groupings
- Remember to always share equally!
3) Collecting Data
- Keep a tally chart recording how many different birds you see in the garden, how many different coloured cars on a journey, or the weather each day for a week
- For example: How many days did it rain? How many sunny days were there? How many cloudy days?
- At the end of the week, count up the numbers and create a bar graph to present your data
- Older children could explore other ways of presenting their data, or calculate the percentages for each type of weather
4) Make a map
- Choose the the area you want to make a map of
- Measure it or pace it out with large steps. Record your measurements as well as the shapes you will be plotting
- Practise your conversion skills, scaling the measurements down for you map picture. Use the same ratio for each measurement
- Don’t forget to include a scale in your picture!
5) Think about capacity
- Get outside with buckets on the beach or watering cans in the garden, and talk about capacity!
- Make predictions for different containers, thinking about their specific shapes and sizes, and how these can affect volume
6) Asking for directions
Asking your child to give you directions to a local landmark or an important place can be fun if you have time to take the occasional detour. Get them to work out how long each stage of the journey takes. If you're in the car, their directions to get home can add a bit of jeopardy and suspense to the journey!
7) Get an estimate
Explore the local area. Ask your child to guess how many buildings are on the street, how far it is to the nearest river, or how many dogs and cats live in your town. Ask for the reasons behind their answers. Estimation is a vital part of numeracy and even questions like: 'Are there more doors or wheels in the world?' can provoke f.
8) Talk about time
How long does it take to walk to the shop, or to school? It's striking how differently children seem to perceive time. Even if they're getting it wildly wrong, thinking about distance and time is all good numeracy.
9) Counting games
How many dogs can you count in a day? How many yellow cars (we're not encouraging the punching thing)? You can assign points to different objects and make it into a competition eg 5 points for a dog, 20 points for a post box. You'll have to adjudicate about who sees something first so they can claim the points. But the competition can motivate kids to add up the numbers.
Everyday Maths
Don’t forget to involve your children in the everyday maths tasks you take on over the summer, whether it’s calculating time for a journey, counting up change to buy an ice cream, measuring out ingredients for a summer recipe, or following instructions to build a new birdhouse.
You can find a wide range of ideas and activities to help children see the maths in everyday life in our Family Maths Toolkit.
More from our Supporting Parents series
Supporting Parents: Lucy Rycroft-Smith on board games, black eyes, and the importance of a 'mistakey' atmosphere
Start improving your numeracy – register on the National Numeracy Challenge now!
National Numeracy has developed an online tool to help you improve your numeracy and boost your confidence. This interactive website is free to use at home, at work or on the move. You can assess your current level of numeracy – completely anonymously – and then begin an online journey to getting the Essentials of Numeracy.
