If you enjoy a sing-song with your groups, then there is nothing better than The Twelve Days of Christmas.
Get the music playing and the words to the song up for the students to join in with. Then get them to do the maths!
How many presents did the true love actually get?
The words from the song will help with finding the solution. (It's not 12 presents!)
Rather than just counting, more able students can find a rule for calculating the number of presents. (If you interpret the song as saying that on each day you get all the previous days' presents, plus the new ones, there are 364 presents in total: 78 on the 12th day.)
Teaching about 2D and 3D shapes? What about making pentominoes and putting them together in various ways to make shapes – as gifts, or different size rectangles to fit in Santa's sleigh?
Make a chocolate selection box out of shapes – 2D or 3D – and ask questions about the properties of the shapes.
Make presents out of rectangles or shapes made from rectangles and ask about area and perimeter.
Use multi-link cubes to make boxes of different sizes. Make them fit into a cuboid-shaped sleigh.
Bring in a chocolate selection box and calculate its surface area and volume. Look at the mass of the whole package and compare it with the mass of the items in it.
Look at the net of the box and nets of other boxes.
Make a net of a box to hold a chocolate inside; decorate and give as a present or put on a Christmas tree. With more able students, they can be more adventurous with their designs. For example, they can look at how to create nets that will give minimum wastage on A4 paper.
You can also get 3D calendars for students to make from nets, try the Cleave Books site for 2012 nets – some are quite tricky to do and require patience.
Chocolate is always a favourite at this time of year.
Surveys are good fun or students can create a questionnaire about favourite chocolate types. Look also at cost and size of chocolate. I like to introduce the topic as if the students are designing a new chocolate bar and need to know as much as possible about what is already on the market.
Design a page with Santa's elves. Give them boots, trousers, tops and hats. How many different combinations can be made using 1 colour, 2 colours, 3 colours, and so on.
Ask probability questions using the students' results. For example:
Have a box of chocolates with hard and soft centres or milk, white and dark chocolate (or use coloured sweets) to go through the probability of choosing a type/colour. Go around the group and as a student chooses a sweet look at how it alters the probability.
There are lots of worksheets around with pictures that can be made using coordinates in both two and four quadrants. For example:
Follow the link for an example from Madras College, St. Andrews, Scotland or Google 'Christmas coordinate pictures' to find many more. Make the activity harder by using decimals.
This is good fun and again you can find plenty of origami templates online. Origami Club is an excellent site for making different Christmas models, but watch out, some of them are very tricky.
Draw half a snowman on squared paper and then ask the students to reflect your drawing to make a complete snowman. Other shapes you can use include crackers, parcels and Christmas trees.
Translate or rotate Christmas pictures. Enlarge a simple Christmas picture copied or cut out from a magazine. For a challenge, try using a scale factor of × −2. These make great display work.
Finally, if you haven't got 10ticks MATHS for your school, I think it's worth considering (this may only be available for UK schools; apologies to readers elsewhere). It's a commercial site, but does include some free resources. They have some fabulous worksheets for Christmas, which my students love doing. For example, using calculators to make words:
My personal favourite sheets are the Christmas calculated colouring in sheets. They cover number and algebra problems in a fun way that students of all abilities enjoy. Go to their Christmas Conundrum page for the Christmas worksheets; I believe you need to register to access them, but there's a selection of free festive games on the page that students will enjoy if you're looking for fun end-of-year activities.
The maths Nrich site also has some great Christmas problem solving ideas. There is an Advent calendar well worth a look at (although we're already partway through Advent, it still makes a nice activity). If you prefer to create your own interactive Advent calendar, there's a template on Planet you can download.
Have fun and merry Christmas!
This article is from Planet's educator-penned blogging series: the Planet Teachers' Lounge.
In order to comment on this blog and any other article in the Planet community, you first need to register with the site.
Great ideas!
Thanks for sharing. I'll share this link with colleagues.