We enjoy doing seasonal activities and we don’t just stick to crafts, a bit of holiday Maths always goes down well – both of mine far prefer the idea of Christmas Maths to normal maths.
We have tried a few of Twinkl’s Maths Mystery sets before and they were hits with both the kids so I had a quick look on the Twinkl site and they had a few Christmas Maths Mysteries that we could choose from, we choose – The Mystery of the Christmas Party and The Mystery of the Missing Christmas Angel.
I liked both of these Maths Mysteries sets because they included maths activities that I knew the kids needed to revise. But then I must admit I always find the mystery sets good, just because the kids end up practicing a number of different maths activities in one go. For example the Mystery of the Christmas Party covered number sequences, greater than and less than numbers, column addition and subtraction (with carrying and exchanging), place value, and reading larger numbers – and my son did all of it in one sitting.
And the Mystery of the Missing Christmas Angel covered square numbers, cube numbers, prime numbers, adding and subtracting with negative numbers, the four operations, place value and rounding.
In case you have never heard of these Maths Mystery sets – the kids have to solve a number of clues – normally 5 – and the way they solve each clue is by doing different Maths activities, so if there are 5 clues that means 5 different Maths activities. Each clue then allows them to eliminate some “suspects” from their list of possible suspects. It is a fairly straightforward concept but I have found it a great way to revise maths and my kids always end up doing more maths in one sitting with a maths mystery than they would do if I just downloaded a number of worksheets (so for me win, win).
I must stress this is not explaining maths – this is practice / revision maths – so what I mean by that is there are no explanations with each clue, it is assumed that when the kids see the adding and subtracting negative numbers that they have already dealt with negative numbers. (There are lots of explaining Maths pages on the Twinkl site.) But as far as practice maths/ revision maths goes we find these maths mystery sets are perfect.
And after the success of the Christmas Mystery pages I could not resist looking for some more Christmas themed pages and I found these Elf maze pages which I really like – one is practicing multiplication and the other is fraction addition, subtraction and multiplication – I love the idea of solving the sums to work your way through the maze.
If you want to read about other Maths Mystery pages from Twinkl you can have a look at this post – Maths Mystery pages
ofamily learning together 