Our 8 year old flounced into the house yesterday and announced (again) how much she hates maths. She’s always found it hard and who can blame her? I’m dreadful at maths myself but unfortunately it’s one of those things you just have to get on with isn’t it?
‘Oh don’t worry honey, maths is useful when you need to work out if you have enough pocket money to buy something you know you’ll die if you don’t get’, I told her reassuringly.
I was speaking to a secondary school maths teachers at a ‘do’ last week and he said they do fun maths days where the kids are grouped up and have to build a virtual house for under £30k…everything has a cost: walls, doors, skirting boards etc. Then, if they come under budget, they get to build a model of their house. How cool is that? I’m going to devise a primary school version. I know lots of people cook with their kids too, and that’s always great for learning maths by stealth.
Anyway, we were all eating whatever it was I’d made for dinner when I had a brain wave and started throwing some odd fun questions out to her and her 6 year old brother. After question 2 she was asking me for another question and then she was making them up for us too. It was actually quite fun and I don’t THINK anyone noticed me on my iPhone under the table with the calculator app open …
Do give it a go. You can either make your own questions up (obviously) or try ours and adapt the questions to suit if needs be!
And if you want more fun ways of learning, check out our Wizards & Wonders Subscription Box:
10 Fun Maths Questions For Any Child Who Hates Maths More Than Anything
- 42 eyeballs weighing 26kg each are put into a bag.
Your friend Mr Sausage Bottom puts 4 more eyeballs into your bag.
How many Kgs of eyeballs are in the bag?
- A zombie has 12 feet. Each foot has 12 toes.
How many toes does the zombie have?
- There are 5 pairs of super cool sunglasses. Each of them is 30cm wide. 10 more pairs come along but they’re only 26cm wide.
If we line them all up, how many cms of super cool sunglasses do we have?
- Your bank account has £65 in it and you want to spend it all on Time Capsules, which cost £5 each.
How many time capsules can you buy and where would you go in them?
- You have 63 ‘sick’ flavoured Jelly Beans, 9 ‘exploding magic’ flavoured ones and 12 ‘all wishes come true’ flavoured jelly beans. You manage to give half of the sick flavoured ones away to your friend who weirdly quite likes them.
How many jelly beans do you have left and which ones are your favourite?
- You have to be at school for 9 O’Clock (09:00 hrs). It takes 27 minutes to walk there, 7 minutes on the bus, 3 minutes by magic carpet or 1 minute by catapult.
You decide to go by catapult because you’re feeling lazy. What time do you need to leave home?
- You go to stay with Uncle Stinky (he never washes his socks). He lives on a farm and has 50 sheep, 300 Kangaroos and a dragon. He asks you to go and feed the sheep for him while he puts an apple pie in the oven. When you get to the sheep field, you see a big hole in the fence and realise that 18 sheep are now jumping around with the kangaroos. Suddenly the dragon into the field and flies off with the 18 sheep! You run back to Uncle Stinky and tell him the bad news. He’s so shocked he can’t think straight and asks you how many sheep he has left. What do you tell him?
- Great Aunt Agnes now lives in your spare room. You actually really like it because every morning before breakfast, she gives you 4 squares of chocolate without your Mum and Dad knowing. Your Mum tells you that Great Aunt Agnes has now lived with you for 7 weeks. How many squares of chocolate have you been given?
- You go into the kitchen and see the most amazing sight: 8 bottles of cherryade, 47 bars of special crunch chocolate, 9 giant marshmallows and a veeeeeeery long cake with cherries on top.
You’re told you can have them all!
How many are there altogether and how much could you eat and drink before you felt sick??
- You swam like a superhero at your swimming lesson yesterday and managed to swim 8 lengths of the pool UNDERWATER AND WITHOUT BREATHING in 10 seconds! Your swimming instructor couldn’t believe his eyes as no one else has ever done this before. He’s just given you a certificate for it but he was so shocked he totally forgot to write down how far you swam.
If one length of the pool is 50 metres and you swam 8 lengths, how many metres was your underwater swim?
If you have any more ideas for questions or other fun ways to learn maths, I will love you forever if you could leave them in a comment below so we can steal it!
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Now this is my kinda maths!
Mine too!! It’s not my favourite subject as everyone who knows me can attest!
I always likes maths as a kids total geek but it made sense to me unlike writing unfortunately which is so fun as now I write a blog! great questions thanks for sharing on #sundaystars
Always the way!!!!! It’s all just practice too though isn’t it?
What funny and cool questions … I have a 13yr old struggles.. I am going to ask her these and see how she reacts .. #brilliantblogposts
oh brilliant – please let me know what she thinks of them or if she comes up with other ones that we could use 🙂
What a great idea. Totally pinching this for my next maths class!
#brilliantblogposts
Oh good and please let me know any extras you add!
I love this, especially the jelly bean one. Made me think of Harry Potter 🙂 #brillblogposts
Debbie
http://www.myrandommusings.blogspot.com
Ha ha ha yes it is a bit isn’t it?? Our kids love anything to do with sweets….
What a great idea!! My eldest daughter is only 5 but I can tell she will hate math as I can see that she struggles some times. I’ll have to start using fantastic characters and magic beans to make her like it like you have done. LOL xx #bigfatlinky
I think anything’s worth a try and hopefully she won’t get a bee in her bonnet about it like our daughter!
Love this. You know I thoroughly love making any lesson fun!! Maths is one of my favs. We do a lot of cooking. But we go to great lengths. Daddy has £20 and you want to make…. We go shopping for it. Then do money and change. When home we look at recipe qualities and amounts, including dicing and slicing into fractions. Cooking time. And then when cooked we looked at weighed portion control.
It’s amazing really what something everyday can do and be made into something educational. I love the questions btw. Ì can’t do bits like that though…..The boys smell an educational question a mile off!!
Oh and thanks for linking up with us on the #bigfatlinky hope to see you there this week
Thanks Martyn!
Kids are so clever! For some reason we got away with this – she knew full well they were maths questions but rose to them because they were ‘a bit different’. Easy to please obviously! Love your maths by cooking – it’s essentially every day stuff which provides the need to learn maths in the first place, so we may as well learn as much of it applied as we can.
My children are the opposite. They love maths. We’ve always thrown real-life maths questions at them, so I guess they’re used to it. Love the idea of these out-of-this-world questions. Must throw a few of those into the mix. #brillblogposts
Hi Cheryl, it’s funny how they’re all different isn’t it? Our 6 year old absolutely loves maths but struggles with other things that our daughter finds really easy. I wish I could wave a magic wand for both of them! We too have always thrown real-life maths questions at them but our daughter developed an instant block in her head every time she knew we were trying to get her to do some maths. She convinced herself that it was too hard. I was hoping this type of question would help her brain to unfreeze so she could get some confidence :).