Celebrating Maths in School

Costume ideas for Maths Day:

Your school might be encouraging children and staff to dress up to celebrate maths. If you’re a bit stuck on what to wear, here are some ideas:

• Mathematical equipment: things like calculators, dice, dominos, clocks, playing cards can be really fun - especially if you can get a whole group of you in the same outfit, or as a range of all the equipment children regularly use.
• Characters from books work well and can be doubled up for World Book Day as a cost-effective idea: Thing 1 and Thing 2 from The Cat in the Hat, Tock or The Mathemagician from The Phantom Tollbooth for example.
• Characters from TV or films: The Numberjacks, The Numberblocks, Thomas the Tank Engine (& friends) with their numbers on.
• Famous Mathematicians: Alan Turing, Ada Lovelace, Pythagoras, Fibonacci (particularly great for Year 6 children/teachers who might be studying some of these people).
• No-fuss ideas include wearing a football strip with a number, or simply drawing numbers or calculations on a white t-shirt!

Purple Mash Activities to celebrate maths:

We have loads of maths activities that you can use to celebrate maths in your school. We have organised these into different topics, each with printable resources, interactive quizzes and games. Explore the different sections that you might want to use here:

• Number and Place Value
• Addition and Subtraction
• Multiplication and Division
• Fractions
• Measure
• Statistics

Try out these fun activities with your class:

Maths and Number Games in Purple Mash

There are a range of games that children can use to practice and test their number skills and have fun doing it. You can find all of the Purple Mash maths games here.

2Race

From mermaids to rockets, 2Race is a virtual collaborative racing maths game which has a variety of exciting themes. It is designed to make learning numbers enjoyable, while at the same time helping to firmly secure knowledge and improve mental arithmetic. All areas of number are covered for KS1 & 2, with pupils’ responses to questions automatically recorded to allow for comprehensive diagnostic data. Teachers and pupils can play collaborative live racing challenges or alternatively, pupils can play pre-made games against virtual players.

Bond Bubbles

Bond Bubbles is a gripping way to reinforce those pesky number bonds. The aim of the game is to use the bubble blower to fire a bubble at a number that will make the number bond being asked. You will find three mysterious new lands waiting to be discovered. Each land has a series of levels, which all need to be completed before you can progress to the next land.

A path through each land is charted on a map for explorers to follow, and they must complete each level to continue along the path in order to complete their journey along each path. And best of all, the game adapts to the player’s ability, making this the perfect game to support all pupils.

Table Toons

Table Toons is a brilliant way to learn times tables through song! Players can:

Create: Here, children can create their own multiplication song! Choose the times tables you want to create a song for, then choose the song style for each question in that table. Children can also choose the 'blob' style and array layout.

Listen: Choose a times table to listen to, and while it plays you can change the song style, 'blob' style and array layout.

Play: Children can choose to answer times tables questions in sequence or in random order, and can choose how long they given themselves for each question - they can even choose 'No Limit'. After answering each question, that times table calculation is sung to them.

However you celebrate maths in your school, we'd love to see it! Be sure to share your costumes, activities and games on our Twitter, Facebook or Instagram accounts.

Whenever you celebrate it, we hope you have a very positive Maths Day! 😉