Maths at Play! Overcoming the odds
October was all about ‘Amazing Maths’ at Imaginosity and, as the Education Development Manager, I for one couldn’t wait to get started. However, the programming for the month was not easy. When we decided to take part in Maths Week the first challenge to overcome was how to make maths fun and engaging for children under 9. As champions of the play to learn method favoured by many early educationalists and theorists such as Piaget and Vygotsky the challenge to incorporate maths was probably heightened by my own "Maths Phobia". I had all the classic symptoms in school, the palm sweating fear of getting called up to the front of class to recite my times tables, the head scratching awfulness of trying to solve quadratic equations, the blank expression when questioned on the sin, cos and tan of right angled triangles. How could I translate the maths I learnt in school to activities and workshops suitable for young children and avoid instilling in them “Maths phobia”? The answer I found that worked lay in getting to the heart of what maths really is and especially what maths skills enable us to do in the real world.
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