history of maths

My biggest challenge is to make maths more interesting.

It was my absolute worst subject at school, and I still struggle with pretty basic concepts.

Maths is important - it's quite needed throughout day to day life. It's important to me though that maths isn't presented as the dry, dull subject I knew at school. I wanted to breath life into the subject (at this point, I should also come clean and admit that we've tried workbooks - many - to find that no one remembers a single thing they have done a week later.)

So we embarked on the History of Maths.

No more will my children ask me "Is it really that important?"

We invited some willing friends round and watched a little cartoon about the history of numbering systems, and then we made our own Sumerian cones, wrote out our birth dates in Egyptian and then painted Babylonian numbers...which is not to be confused with paint by numbers. (Although I love to see that in Hobbycraft!)

We looked at fractions, and divided up the rocky road I'd made according to the Egyptian method.

Whilst they painted, I also had the BBC documentary History of Maths playing, which I think interested me far more than it did the kids.

It was a fun afternoon, and the kids (both my own and the visiting ones) have asked to do another session soon.

Who knows, soon we may be able to understand this.