Maths at Home
Maths at Home
April 2025 - Seeing Squares
This is a game for two players. You will need a piece of dotty paper (available below). Players take it in turns to choose a dot on the grid. The winner is the first to have chosen four dots that can be joined to form a square.
If you play online,
https://nrich.maths.org/square-it/
the first player will place blue triangles and the second player will place pink squares. Here is a picture showing a completed game being won by the pink square player:
Squares can be anywhere and any size. Once you've played a few times against a friend, you might like to discuss your strategies and then test them by playing against the computer. Can you find a winning strategy?
Dotty Paper
March 2025 -
To link with Red Nose Day the challenge this month is based on a cake sale.
An array is an arrangement of pictures or objects into columns and rows. They need to be arranged into a square or a rectangle with no holes in the middle to be an array.
For this challenge, an array is a full box of cakes. For example, this is an array for 20 cakes:
Mrs Bishop would love to see your solutions to this Red Nose Day problem. Please email photos of your arrays to: ebishop @dinglewell-inf.gloucs.sch.uk so they can shared on the school website to celebrate maths at home.
February 2025 - Three Squares
This month’s activity is Three Squares.
What is the greatest number of squares you can make by overlapping three squares of the same size?
Mrs Bishop would love to see the pictures of the arrangements of your squares, so please send your solutions to her and these can be shared on the school website to celebrate maths at home.
ebishop@dinglewell-inf.gloucs.sch.uk
She would also like to know how you organised your thinking. How did you know that you had found the greatest possible number of squares?
January 2025 - Inside Triangles
How many different triangles can you draw on the dotty grid which each have one dot in the middle?
Here is a four by four dotty grid.
I have joined three dots on the grid to make a triangle which has one dot inside it.
How many different triangles with one dot in the middle can you draw?
How do you know you have found them all?
December 2024 - Christmas Elves
Father Christmas gives his elves some new clothes: red, green or yellow jackets and trousers.
The elves have fun by mixing up the jackets and trousers.
How many different ways can they wear the jackets and trousers?
Please send your Christmas Elves solutions to Mrs Bishop, as I would love how many different outfits the elves can create.
ebishop@dinglewell-inf.gloucs.sch.uk
Solutions
November 2024 - How Many Dots?
How many dots can you see? How did you count them? Talk with your family about how they counted the dots. How can you check your answer is correct.
I would love to know how you counted the dots, so please send your thoughts to Mrs Bishop and the these can be shared on the school website to celebrate maths at home.
Solutions
Millie decided to group them in pairs and count up in multiples of two to find the total number of dots. She recorded her workings as the two times table.
Lily said, "First I just counted the dots. That was medium hard. Then I asked Mummy and she counts the diagonals but misses out the crossings. Daddy and Christopher count the rows up and down. Then I counted the rows up and down."
Useful Websites
