Four Fun Outdoor Maths Activities for You to Try

It can be taught not only in the classroom, but also outdoors too and that’s why we wanted to share a few of our fun activity ideas, that you could try with your students.

Let’s go!

Playground Problem Solving

Write some word problems to encourage the children to explore the outdoors to find all of the information they need to be able to solve the question – perfect for a bit of critical thinking!

For example…

  1. Find a picnic table. How many legs has it got?
  2. Seven apples are on the table. Three are red and the rest are green. How many apples are green?
  3. There are eight rulers and three pencils in a bag. Sam placed two more rulers in the bag. How many rulers are there now in total?

 

To challenge students further, why not try…

  1. If there were six picnic tables, how many legs would there be in total?
  2. Charlie has five more apples than Beth. Beth has nine apples How many apples does Beth have?
  3. There are 24 rulers and 14 pencils in a bag. Sam placed 12 more rulers in the bag. How many rulers are there now in total?

 

Surveys

Ask students to create their own mini survey and show the final results in a bar chart. They could do their survey on the number of cars they see go past the school or the most popular colour car. There’s plenty of things students could observe.

Positioning

Put the students into groups and challenge them to direct their teammates around the playground using only turns e.g. turn 90 degrees clockwise, then 180 anticlockwise etc.

Tip! You could make this more challenging by blindfolding the student following the instructions.

Ball Game

Get your students memorising their times tables, but setting a mini game where you start off with the 2 x table and throw the ball to each of the students and they follow the sequence and answer the next multiple. If a student drops the ball, then the game is restarted – a perfect way for students to recall their multiplication facts!

We hope you enjoyed our outdoor lesson ideas. If you have any, please do tweet us @EducationCity – we’d love to hear your thoughts!