Article by Jen Squire
Last week, teachers from around the region joined us for a fun ‘Transforming the Maths classroom’ Professional Development session. While the words ‘maths’ and ‘fun’ aren’t seen together in sentences often, Andrew Lorimer-Derham from Think Square spent the day showing us how to truly insert fun into a math classroom and encouraged us to reimagine what learning maths could look like. Alliances were made and competitive streaks came out as participants played board games that can teach a variety of mathematical concepts without the need for worksheets.
One game that was especially exuberant was ‘Rektangles’ where players strategically placed rubber band made rectangles on a peg board with the perimeter of the shape dictated by a roll of the dice. The aim of the game was to be the player at the end with the most ‘captured’ total area and is designed to teach students to work backwards to find the dimensions of a rectangle after being given the area or perimeter. While it certainly allowed us to practise and improve those skills we also had a lot of fun strategically blocking other players and trying to win!
From Mathematic-tac-toe to Thinking Bingo, and online games like Fried Circuits fraction puzzles and Tumbling Towers we covered a range of maths areas without feeling like we had ‘done maths’ all day. There were lively group discussions after playing each game, with participants unpacking what they had learned and commenting that failure during these games was all part of the process rather than a negative experience.