A fantastic start to our half term with a week full of Mathematical challenges, with a competitive edge. Working as a team, we have been collecting crystals. We have travelled the world and looked at the Maths and famous Mathematicians from Greece, Egypt, India and China. We have learnt so much about these four countries and their key mathematical discoveries.
On Tuesday, we travelled to Greece. We have had lots of challenges thrown our way! We started the day investigating geometric patterns. We had to visualise and identify patterns while exploring connections between multiples. Another investigation saw us explore whether there are an infinite number of primes. All of this stems from ideas and theories from Greek Mathematicians.
On Wednesday, our Maths took us to Egypt! We looked at hieroglyphics and solved problems with symbols and not numbers. We then moved on to looking at the volume of pyramids. We then constructed our own pyramids from nets and looked at its similarities to other 3D shapes. Our final challenge of the day was working out fractions ‘The Egyptian Way’ – they only work with unit fractions.
On Thursday, our maths took us to China! We learnt that Chinese mathematicians were intrigued by magic shapes such as magic triangles. We then created our own magic triangles in which each side adds up to 23. We then learnt about tangrams and how they are a square made up of several other shapes. Our challenge was to rearrange the shapes to create a parallelogram. Finally, we used our maths knowledge to answer complex multi- step word problems.
Today, we travelled all the way to India to explore Indian mathematicians. We researched and created double page spread about Indian mathematician Brahmagupta. Using our knowledge of shapes, we made our own 3-Dimensional growth patterns. Another challenge was to position the numbers so that every circle adds up to zero. Finally, we learnt that Ancient Indians developed the decimal system and looked at creating our own addition sums involving decimals.
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