The Chronicle

Our Stars of the Week this week are:

Congratulations to them all!

Children from the Junior 2 class at Crackley Hall School have come first in the country in a global maths competition that pitched children against their equivalent year group. The school’s Junior 3 class did nearly as well placing second nationally in the Year 3 league, while the Junior 1 children came fourth overall.

Pupils at Crackley Hall joined millions of children across the world on Wednesday 5 May in a Live Mathletics challenge, a world-wide event that saw schools go head-to-head in maths quizzes to mark World Maths Day. Pupils took part online, completing 20 rounds of number-based questions, against children in the same school year, answering as many sums as possible in 60 seconds.

Junior 2 were ranked 31st in the world with Junior 3 coming 39th globally and Junior 1 99th. Across the school there were also many excellent individual results with Junior 3 pupil, Arthur C. placing 13th nationally in his year group, and taking the honour of being the top achieving pupil at the school. Junior 3, Isaac F. came 2nd in school with Junior 6, Yung F. 3rd. 

Headmaster, Rob Duigan, was delighted with the results and said, “This is a super achievement and I am very proud of the children. Their success in this competition reflects the high standard of teaching and learning here at Crackley Hall. Having fun with maths is important to embedding maths skills, we use Mathletics to enhance and embed our pupils’ learning and the children really enjoyed this Mathletics Challenge.”

The competition was part of a week of mathematical activities at the school that culminated in a themed Number Day.

Crackley Hall joined schools across the country on Friday 7 May for a mega maths fundraising day for the NSPCC. It was a fantastic end to a whole week of mathematical fun after pupils in Junior 1 through to Junior 6 also took part in the Mathletics World Maths Day challenge earlier in the week.

Maths lead, Mrs Van Zyl, and her Junior 3 class gave 100% out on the playground in their Maths lesson and across the school the children took part in a host of mathematical activities. Pupils made a donation to come to school in number themed costumes raising a final total of £433.21 that will be donated to support the work of the NSPCC.

In Reception the children’s day started with a surprise visit from Buddy, the NSPCC mascot, who was thrilled to see all their wonderful number-related costumes. Together they read the story ‘Monster Maths’, created animal tangram pictures, investigated Numberblocks to 20 and sang and danced along to number songs.

Buddy was also a big part of Junior 1’s Number Day and pupils enjoyed solving a series of number challenges to unlock Buddy from his number puzzle. After counting the busy bees and dividing up the cheeky chicks they were all so excited when Buddy popped in to thank them and say hello.

Junior 2 really enjoyed Number Day too, they took on a Murder Mystery-style ‘who dunnit’ challenge that linked beautifully to their work on The Great Fire of London, pupils had to use a range of maths skills within 50 to sleuth their way through a series of clues.

Junior 3 took their maths beyond the classroom and investigated multiplication patterns in circles on the playground. They also took part in a game of fraction frenzy and completed the Buddy key challenge.

Mrs Wildey’s Junior 4 group had to escape crystal mazes by solving multiplication tables puzzles. Excellent times table knowledge and speedy recall helped all the children break free. They then worked as a group to complete a round robin game of random multiplication questions and their co-operation, collaboration, maths talk and enjoyment of maths was wonderful to see. While Junior 4B explored percentages and how they relate to fractions and one pupil made a ‘rounding snake’ which Mrs Burley had taught them to use to help with rounding numbers.

For Junior 5 it was all about proportions and they explored whether they were similar to Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian Man by measuring different parts of their bodies and comparing these to Vitruvius’ statements.

In Junior 6 the children threw themselves into some competitive mental maths, Mrs Vaughan’s group competed in teams for the top spot in ‘Who Wants to be a Mathionnaire’! with two groups achieving the accolade of reaching and completing the 1,000,000 point question! While Mrs Horan’s group worked their way through some mind-bending word problems with a twist, which weren’t as straight forward as they seemed.

And the children in Little Crackers Nursery even joined in the fun, counting forwards and backwards, matching, recognising, adding, taking away inside, outside and even at lunchtime!

All the children and staff thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to ‘play’ with maths for the day.

Junior 3, Lizzie, produced this beautiful wooden bird box at home and was so pleased with it that she brought it into school to show us all. The bird box was part of a craft set Lizzie received as a present from her grandmother and creative Lizzie really enjoyed making and decorating it. Her teachers were so impressed with her design technology skills that they decided that the bird box could be hung in the Forest School, so with Mrs Clark’s help, Lizzie hung it there.

Well done Lizzie on your really wonderful work!

Mathlete of the week for Mrs Hardwick's class is Edward

Mathlete of the week for Mrs Glen-Root's class is Thomas

Mathlete of the week for Mrs Holmes's class is Evelyn

Mathlete of the week for Mr Stedeford's group is Grace

Mathlete of the week for Mrs Van Zyl's class is Rory

Mathlete of the week for Mrs Wildey's class is Jakob

Mathlete of the week for Mrs Burley's group is Charlie

Mathlete of the week for Mrs Roberts's group is Alfred

Mathlete of the week for Mrs Lammas's group is George

Well done all!