The Wildwood Maths Trail.

As today was an INSET day (teacher training day), the school summer holidays start here!
Honor has declared that she wants to improve her maths and is committed to practising over the break, so....


We are members of a local wildlife park called Wildwood at Herne. It is a fabulous place, dedicated to the conservation of British wildlife. I prepared 'maths trails' for the children to practise the skills they have covered over the past year at school. Honor has just finished year 4 so her questions involved calculating entrance fees using addition and multiplication, decimals and subtraction (working out the change for a family of 5 from £40). "Gosh, that's a lot of money!" she exclaimed. "Yes", I replied. "Good job we have membership!".
Then she went to the toilets and did some percentage calculations in there! (And spent a penny - hee, hee!)

She also collected statistics on some of the animals to practise converting measurements in cm and grammes into decimals and to compare later using different sorting strategies ie carroll and venn diagrams and also made a tally of the three different types of deer that she saw to later record on a bar chart. She is really into bar graphs at the moment!

She has also been learning about postion and direction and finds it hard to remember angle turns and clockwise/anti-clockwise, so we did a bit of this too. Facing these deer faces she had to make a 180 degree turn clockwise and record the name she could see in front of her. (It was Jeremy, a plaque on a tree marked the place where I think a beloved animal may be buried.)

Henry has just finished Reception year and his questions were brief and simple counting, addition and subtraction. I got him practising reading as much of the stuff we passed as possible, too.

They enjoyed doing their 'work'. But the park was probably the best bit. Especially as we bumped into some other of their friends on a day out .

I love this wooden dragonfly that Hope is sitting on.