Chesterfield school celebrates return of ‘Marvellous Maths Day’

Staff at Spire Infant and Nursery School spiced up the study of numbers, calculations, shapes and equations with fun lessons and some dressing up as part of ‘Marvellous Maths Day’ on Friday, June 24.

The school, which caters for children between the ages of two and seven, has held the dedicated day for several years in an effort to raise the profile of maths and engage pupils with the subject from a young age.

Deputy headteacher Andrea James explained how important the subject is.

She said: “Every day is about maths. It’s a key skill to help children with their lives. Maths is amazing and just seeing our children showing so much enthusiasm and loving what they’re learning, it’s really meaningful to me.

"Maths is magical because there’s always patterns and there’s always connections with everyday life. When you see a child making those connections, that’s the point when you know you’ve done a good job; knowing they’ve got a positive attitude towards learning and loving the subject so much.”

Ms Andrews explained how the usual timetable was scrapped for Marvellous Maths Day, with a range of 'exciting maths activities’ taking the place of regular lessons.

Children were also invited to dress up in their best maths-related costumes – many of which were handmade.

"In every class there is a different theme,” Ms Andrews added. “In one class they are learning about shapes, in another money, and in another measures, length and height, capacity, so there’s lots of different aspects of maths in each classroom.

"About 95 per cent of the children participated in terms of getting dressed up. We've had children dressed as calculators, there was one little girl who came as a mathematician butterfly with a Pi symbol on her back, another boy came dressed as Einstein, a scientist and mathematician.

"They’ve just been going around and having a really lovely day. I’m so proud of children because they’ve got such a love of maths.

"It is a very powerful tool to equip the children with, it’s a life skill. Everyone at Spire just loves maths so we want to make it fun and purposeful and celebrate it.”

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