Belmont Maths Week

How time flies when you’re doing sums! Maths Week has been a great success in both Lower School and Upper School; Monday saw many children utilising the properties of an isosceles triangle to estimate the height of the chapel using merely one piece of A4 paper. On Tuesday we had our first official house event of the year in the form of the Upper School Inter-House Maths Challenge, with the same being repeated for Lower School the next afternoon. These events comprised 4 rounds:

A Logic Round in which students had to use a stringent process of elimination in order to ascertain which combination of city, jersey colour, coach, mascot and final position applied to 5 different sports teams based on very little cryptic information.
The ever-popular Relay Round saw students rushing back and forth from marking station to workspace, desperate to progress on to increasingly more puzzling questions from all different aspects of mathematics.
A Crossnumber, the superior mathematical version of a crossword, with some clues relating directly to the answers of other clues and leading to a particularly fiendish puzzle for each of the house teams to solve under time pressure.
Finally, there was the Group Round where teams were provided with a selection of individually tricky conundrums, with it being up to each trio as to whether they attempted a different question each or combined their collective knowledge to try and solve the particularly difficult questions.

As is the annual tradition we had some students in Years 5 & 6 participate in the Primary Maths Challenge on Wednesday, a national competition in which students have to employ those key skills involved with problem-solving to decipher the answer in a multiple-choice challenge paper. Awards shall be handed out next week to those who participated.

On Thursday the Adventure Playground was transformed into a mathematical assault course for the LS & US Scavenger Hunt. This involved the children moving from clue to clue, relying on their previous answer to progress to the next question hidden inside tire swings, monkey bars and balance beams. I must say a special thank you to my form 8OM who were truly fantastic whilst helping out during LS lunch, displaying endless kindness and patience with the younger children who were thrilled.

Lower School lessons this week have focused around the concepts of time and estimation, with forms working together on various enrichment activities as well as trying to answer questions about different mathematicians displayed around school. Miss Cregg tells me that she has received some brilliant entries from children for her poster competition, showcasing where mathematics can be found in all walks of everyday life.

I would like to thank my department as well as the countless other members of staff who have contributed to making Maths Week a great success at Belmont; gratitude must also be given to the many children who immersed themselves in all the activities throughout the week alongside their phenomenal work ethic and continual embracing of challenge. I am looking forward to next year’s Maths Week already!

Mr McGuinness, Head of Mathematics