House Maths
If you ever needed convincing that maths is cool, then you just need to see the excitement of House Maths day at the Prep – the day when rock ‘n roll comes to town. The children and staff dress up as rock stars in their House colours and take part in quests and competitions, all in the name of enjoying maths.
This isn’t just because we love dressing up at the Prep, which we do, or because the House spirit remains as strong as ever, because it does, but because we know that for some children the idea of maths is an unhappy one. Somewhere along the line, some children create an image of themselves in their minds that they are not good at maths.
This then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as every time they have a maths lesson or maths homework, or even when maths is simply mentioned, their brains go into fight or flight mode, and the thinking part of the brain becomes harder to reach. So at this point, learning genuinely becomes harder, but not as a result of the sums in front of them. How we see ourselves as learners is often more important than our actual academic capacity.
So we set about showing the children why maths is cool, and then we add in the frivolity to tackle the emotional associations. Throughout our inquiry curriculum, the children engage with how maths allows us to solve real-world problems and think in powerful new ways. Whether it’s predicting the weather (and one of our Year 6’s is currently working on a machine learning weather forecasting model in his spare time – more on that to come in due course), building skyscrapers, or exploring space, mathematical thinking is at the core of innovation.
We work hard to ensure the children know that maths teaches logic, creativity, and resilience, the kind you build when a problem doesn’t work out the first time and you try again. Far from being just numbers on a page, maths is in our toolkit for curiosity. It challenges you to ask “what if?” and then gives you the tools to find the answer.
Our rockstar inspirations come from Brian May with his PhD in Astrophysics or Art Garfunkel (less gnarly riffs perhaps) with a Master’s in Mathematics, but actually the children and staff inspire each other with their wonderful willingness to be silly, have some fun and spend time together. We’re a team, children and grown-ups together, and that makes coming to school a genuine joy.
Wishing you a lovely week,
Alice Goodfellow
