Project Outlines

Teacher Carol Slasberg worked with Andrew throughout the project. Here she supplies her notes on the projects carried out with the children on various aspects of mathematics and numeracy.

Projects:
• Circles
• Fractions
• Ratio
• Volume and cylinders
• Multiplication and patterns

Notes for lessons

Andrew and I were excited about our ideas from the very beginning of the project. At our first planning meeting at Down Hall we talked about the kinds of learning experiences we could incorporate into the building of a sound garden. We discussed the areas of maths we could use as ways in to the project- circles, patterns, fractions, measures - but much of our work evolved as we worked.
From the very first day of Andrew’s working with the children, when they spent a whole day exploring rhythms and patterns and playing together as a band, it was fun. The children, especially those in the first cohort, just wanted to find out more. Because we were allowed to be creative, we could let them spend a whole day exploring one idea. I wanted the second cohort especially to have the opportunity to do as much practical work as possible to develop understanding.

Circles

Stimulus: We had spent a whole day outside playing drums. After school parents joined in. We wanted the children to make drums as part of the project.I wanted children to understand the vocabulary of circles (circumference, diameter, radius and area) by investigating a variety of circles. The more able children were given the challenge of seeing if they could find a relationship between the diameter and the circumference of their circles. The less able children found lots of ways of measuring the circumference. Middle abilities had to find ways of finding the centre of their circles. By the end of the lesson Andrew had worked with some children drawing chords and using them to find the centre of circles. A group took to playground with string, chalk and trundle wheels to build circles by doubling the radius and predicting and measuring the circumferences of some very large circles.

Fractions

Stimulus: We were working on writing and composing music, and used the
relationship with maths.
I wanted the children to understand what fractions were and the relationship between families of fractions. We decided to use musical notes as our starting point.

Mrs Vigo introduced musical notes as characters.

This was a practical session linked to listening. The children went on to
discover how halves, quarters, eights and sixteenths are related.

They went on to use what they had found out to compose and play rhythms.
When we did similar activities for the second cohort we developed the
work further.

They found fractions of circles and used these to divide
bicycle wheels into fractions.

Ratio

Stimulus: Pip brought in a violin, a viola, a cello and a double bass and the
children measured the lengths of the strings and compared the sound they
made. They looked for patterns in the lengths of the strings. A few of the Sound Garden designs were based on xylophone-based ideas and we wanted the children to use maths to build the instruments they had designed.

I wanted the children to understand that they couldn’t just make notes of random sizes and they would have to find the relationship between the notes. We began by collecting together every xylophone and glockenspiel we could find. The children took the instruments apart and measured the notes. Some spent time finding difference and predicting how long the next note would be. Some added all the lengths together and worked out how much of the whole length each note was.

Andrew used the children’s measurements to cut notes from a piece of scaffolding for their first metal instrument: tubular bells.

When we did a similar lesson this year we went on to weigh each of the notes as well as measure them.

Volume and cylinders

Stimulus: drums again. We were preparing a samba presentation for the opening of our new building.

I wanted the second cohort of Year 5 to explore the drums in a different way. We collected tins of all different sizes, from baked bean tins to catering tins and oil drums. As well as exploring radius, diameter and circumference, these children went on to find out how much liquid their tin held and compared it to how much liquid their tin displaced and, of course, how much the displaced liquid weighed.

Multiplication and patterns

Stimulus: The need to learn tables for rapid recall. This work developed over many weeks and became the focus for some super compositions as well as for some exciting discoveries.

I showed the children how to work out the digital pattern of the two times table and left them to work out the rest. There was much excitement when the patterns kept repeating. The lower ability children, especially, were engrossed in this because they were fascinated by the way the patterns repeated over 40 or more calculations. One bright spark found his digital pattern had a root of 9. Within minutes this was being tested on other table patterns and sure enough all the patterns had a root of 9. Two boys spent a few hours surrounded by large pieces of sugar paper with calculations to test their theory on the root patterns of square numbers. We were being creative big time!

Andrew worked with pairs of children using a computer programme to compose music for their times-table digital root patterns. This formed the basis of our ‘Symphony of 9’.