Another twitter inspiration came
from @Matt6453 who had started his own Numeracy in PE Extra-Curricular club
within his school. Inspired by this I approached a member of the maths department to discuss if
they would be interested in doing something similar within our school. As you
can imagine they jumped at the chance to make maths fun.
We decided we would start using
the successful idea that Matt had used and do a free throw competition where
students work out their success percentage with each student getting five free
throws each time it was their go. Students did really well working out the
percentages quickly within their heads and having the maths teacher there for
when it got harder to help them with how to work out the more difficult
numbers. We had nearly 20 students at our outside basketball hoops battling the
wind to have a go. The best thing was that it managed to capture the interest of
a group of our hardest to reach students who are on the positive change
programme due to their behaviour within school not being as it should. These
students loved it!
Where are we taking it next. This
is where we are going to move away from what Matt is doing with his Numeracy in
PE club. At our school we are fortunate enough to have a number of rowing
machines, which our students love. So we are going to use a 500m rowing
challenge to get students to calculate their average speed. I am hopeful that
having so many rowers and with the activity being so popular with our students
we should be able to get more students involved.
The
plan is to then do some work with cricket in the coming weeks with each week a
focus on a different maths technique, that's where the maths expert comes in. I
would love to do something with skipping also, but am yet to work out what. I
must admit I was a little sceptical at first if it would work, but thought I
would take a risk and have a go and the initial signs are looking good. The key
to its success will be ensuring the activities are fun and accessible and
keeping the maths techniques going.
