St Patrick's Primary School, Liverpool

We love Maths – 2020-21 Highlights!

At St Patrick’s Primary School, maths is much more than a school subject; it’s an essential life skill that we will use every day of our lives. It’s also really fun! Here are some of the great moments we have enjoyed in our maths learning this year.

NSPCC Number Day, 7th May 2021

In May, we had one of our favourite days of the year: NSPCC Number Day! We get to dress up with a maths theme, take on fun maths challenges throughout the day and raise money for a good cause at the same time. Take a look at some of these photos from a fantastic day!

Census Day, 19th March 2021

We like to plan regular dates in our calendar to enable us to link maths to real life events. On 19th March, each class in the school carried out special maths activities relating to Census Day.

In EYFS, the children started to learn about what the census means and how our maths skills can give us important information, recording the snacks each person likes and counting to find the totals. This developed throughout the school, with older children carrying out their own censuses and recording them in different ways.

Year 4 compared statistics from today and the 1800s about population sizes and the job market, even learning some Victorian slang to compare to today’s language! They then created their own time capsules to teach the children of the future a bit about life in 2021!

The children had their own ideas too; Ryan in Year 3 had a great idea to count all the rooms in school for Census Day and see who could estimate the correct number. Jack made a tally chart on our way around the school, and 5 people in the school got it exactly right!

Maths during Lockdown – Home Learning

Our teachers, parents and children did an amazing job during lockdown, continuing to learn and produce great work in maths! Teachers delivered daily lessons on Teams, as well as providing extra resources, ideas and challenges on our website and Twitter account (including low-stakes quizzes, real life maths problems relating to football, money, cooking, etc. and our favourite collection of free (and screen-free!) maths games to play with the family. We also launched two whole-school Times Tables Rockstars competitions – one during the month of January and another on World Maths Day 3rd March, when we challenged a number of local schools to an online times tables battle (won by our own Year 5 class)!

Liverpool Maths Party, 25th September 2020

We had great fun celebrating the LLP Liverpool Maths Party, with exciting indoor and outdoor maths games across the school. We even made a special music video for the day: https://youtu.be/7RXUtKHFnuQ!

Now take a look at what kind of things our children have been up to in their daily maths learning!

Maths in EYFS

Maths in KS1

Maths in KS2

Paul Cezanne-inspired still life drawing

A lovely afternoon creating our own still life compositions, following our learning about Paul Cezanne. The children used different grades of pencils to create lighter areas and shadows. As the pencils were water soluble, (nice science link there!) some of us used damp paintbrushes to blend our shading better.

 

 

Mapping for England Day

 

Awesome mapping skills shown by Year 3 this morning. We started off looking at aerial maps of England, before the children learned how to find towns and cities using coordinates. Super work!

 

 

African food tasting!

Thanks so much to our amazing families who kindly cooked us African food! We just LOVED it!

 

Amazing African Percussion with Mr Larkin

We loved our music lesson with Mr Larkin this afternoon! “Af-ri-ca (Man-de-la)!”

The Chinese Youth Orchestra

Wow! We watched the most incredible performance of Chinese music today, performed by a very talented group of Cantonese teenagers. It was awe inspiring, and we were all amazed by the beautiful, powerful sounds made by their traditional instruments.

 

 

Arabic Day in Year 3

 

Our Arabic day has been fantastic! We started our celebrations learning about which countries in the world speak Arabic as their official language. We discovered it is spoken widely across Africa and some parts of Asia.  Farhan’s mum then visited us to teach us about henna and she kindly spent an hour decorating our hands. Finally, we spent the afternoon making a Middle Eastern dish called falafel and a minty yoghurt dip to accompany it. Wonderful cross curricular learning: art, geography, D&T and British Values all rolled into one day!

Making flapjacks

We had a super morning following a recipe to make fruity flapjacks for our cake sale. The children had to weigh out the ingredients, carefully chop up the fruit and use a pan to melt the butter, sugar and syrup. They showed excellent cookery skills (we’ve practised lots this term), and applied all of their measure learning from maths over the last few weeks.

 

 

Number Day Bake Sale

 

Great to see children putting their maths into practise today selling cakes and working out change for the NSPCC! Thanks to all of the parents who made cakes, supported the children and to Year 3 pupils for making flapjacks. We’re still counting all the money we made, watch this space!

Super Star Winners!

 

These wonderful children have done a fantastic job being super stars!