Year four KES Maths prep school competition

On Wednesday 6th March, four of our year four mathematicians headed to KES Birmingham with Mrs Groen and Mrs Lynch to compete against ten other independent primary schools from Solihull, Birmingham and the surrounding areas. 

We started the day with some warm up activities before the first part of the competition which involved working together as a team to complete a numbercross. The team applied all of the techniques we had practised in school in order to successfully answer the clues methodically. Our team scored very well in this round. The second part of the competition involved a relay race with challenging problem solving questions, the pressure mounted in this part of the competition and unfortunately we lost valuable marks when we made a few errors due to rushing. 

After lunch, we took part in a fun maths lesson with puzzles and games including a ladders game and a strategy game using counters. The counters game simply involved taking it in turns to take one or two counters, leaving your opponent with the last counter in order to win. The children had to decide whether it was best to go first or second in order to strategically win the game. 

This was followed by a maths-themed show from Maths entertainer and founder of 'House of Maths' Barney Maunder-Taylor, we discovered what truncated 3D shapes look like, one of which was a football shape! We also explored ways to add triangular numbers and how to learn the 99 timestable. 

Finally, the winners were announced, we did not come in the top three but we had a wonderful day and the team represented our school exceptionally well.