Maths Day!

We had our Maths House Event on the last day of term this month.  I know, what were we thinking!? It ended up being a successful and enjoyable way to end the term and I highly recommend celebrating a day of Maths.  Here's a schedule of our events:

1)  Maths Videos -  My colleague Yasir and I were intrigued to see what our students could come up with after finding a whole bunch of hilarious and creative videos from WSHS, a high school in the United States.  Check out a couple of my favorites below.

Amazing right?  Well our students did not disappoint.  They rewrote the lyrics, recorded original vocals and came up with some clever ways to present their topic of choice.  We gave them two hours to record the videos, but we had them well prepped ahead of time.  We showed the videos in our classes, had short 5 minute meetings with the house heads and made sure that they weren't starting from scratch on Friday.  We also had the teachers from each house give their groups a score on a rubric we created for the day.

2)  Pi Pie Contest -  We advertised that there would be a prize for the most creative Pi pie or cake.  We had six different entries and after students voted we cut them up and let them eat whichever they liked.

 

3)  Giant Fizz/Buzz Competition -  Each house came up to the front of our amphitheater (we are a small school) and stood in a circle.  If you are not familiar with Fizz/Buzz, students go around the circle counting from 1 upwards.  If their number is a multiple of 3 you say Fizz and if its a multiple of 5 you say Buzz and if its both, you say...Fizz/Buzz.  If you make a mistake or hesitate then you are out of the game.  We narrowed it down to the top two people in each house and then had a big inter house competition.

4)  Pi Reciting Contest -  What Maths day is complete without the pi reciting contest?  We also tried to get our students onto the leaderboard at http://pi-world-ranking-list.com.  We downloaded the entry sheets and had students fill them in before we had the contest.  We allowed students to write down their numbers or announce them to the crowd.  Our record?  102!

5)  Finally, we watched each of the videos and had a teacher from year 6 judge his favorite.  We had also planned to have the KS4 coordinator play guitar and sing the Pi song, but unfortunately we ran out of time.

It was a really fun day, but by the time the bell rang at 12:30pm both Yasir and I were happy that we could put our feet up for the next two weeks!  Resources, videos and pictures will soon follow!