How it works...

Maths is a language!

To be good at it, children need to be able to understand it, speak it, read it and write it.

Whether you are a parent or a teacher, that means you need to get your children thinking and talking. The activities on this web site are designed to do just that, as well as to help them memorise key number facts and develop their mental calculation skills.

I am a full time UK primary school Deputy Head Teacher & Maths specialist and have been developing the Maths Investigations activities over many years of teaching Maths to primary children. The children in my school love it! (see their testimonials)

Some of the activities are for use on a tablet or other device. Others are for you to print and use away from the computer. Something for everyone!

The Activities

The tablet activities are designed to be used on a tablet with wi-fi.

Your children will be encouraged to use practical equipment, to look for patterns, to explore relationships between numbers & concepts, and to use appropriate language & notation to explain their thinking.

These activities are highly engaging and will have your children clamouring for more!

The printable games are for you to print and use away from the computer.

Some of these help with memorising number bonds and multiplication tables. There are also a couple of games for learning to tell the time.

Finally, there are the photocopiable investigations, which are mainly for school use and are designed to get children thinking and asking questions about why things work the way they do.

Some of the printable guides and activities are free. Others can be purchased individually.

There are also several levels of subscription, which give unlimited access to everything for a year for as little as £15.

If you would like to try out the tablet activities, you can sign up for a free trial first, to see if you like them!

How does Maths Investigations work?

The printable activities need little explanation. Just print them out, read the instructions carefully and photocopy any sheets you need copies of.

The tablet activities are arranged by subject (counting & place value, add & subtract, multiply & divide, fractions, decimals & percentages etc) and are ordered on the Learning Ladder in 8 steps of increasing difficulty. You can give your children one-click access to all of them by setting up, on your tablets, a web shortcut to the pupil home page.

Then, to provide a coherent skills progression and learning pathway through the activities there are the Wise Owls. Children can sign up with each in turn, and each covers a different stage in the learning journey. Within each owl there is a series of activities, most of which have an investigation, which children are encouraged to do together with a friend or parent, and a quiz which should be done alone.

The tournaments can be done at any point when working on an owl as a diagnostic test. When you have done the tournament you get red triangles directing you to the activities you most need to practise. This encourages children to value and learn from their mistakes.

The Learning Wall gives pupils and teachers and parents a clear visual guide to the skills that have been secured and the ones that still need to be worked on.

In addition, it is possible for teachers to set specific activities for different groups in the class and to monitor their progress through these and through the owls. This makes it easy for teachers to make targeted interventions with small groups of pupils to ensure there are no gaps in their understanding, while allowing others to stretch and challenge themselves.

The best way to get to know the online activities is to play with them, which you can do by signing up for a free trial. There are also numerous video guides and help pages to help you understand in more detail how they work.

Tablet Activities Wise Owl Maths

Photocopiable Investigations

Printable Games

Sign Up Families, teachers and schools.

Who is Maths Investigations for?

Maths Investigations is for children aged 6 to 13 and their parents and teachers.

Children are captivated by the colourful interface to the tablet activities and enjoy learning with the wise owls, who each help them on a different stage in their Maths learning journey. Children are encouraged to take an active role in planning and assessing their own learning, through setting targets, regular self-assessment and tracking of progress. Along the way, numerous collectibles keep them highly motivated, so much so that you will have them clamouring to use them before and after school and at weekends as well as during lessons! There are characters to reward effort, medals to recognise achievement, jewels to encourage thinking, and much more...

For parents there is general advice on supporting Maths learning at home, along with access to a number of photocopiable games to help your children learn their number bonds and multiplcation tables. There is also a helpful guide outlining some of the practical activities you can do to support learning with the Wise Owls, and a detailed set of help pages, explaining how to get the most from the online activities.

Teachers have access to a range of printable investigations and games which can be used to either introduce or consolidate learning in a particular area. There is also a step-by-step guide showing how to set up the tablet activities for classroom use, use the diagnostic tests to identify specific gaps in understanding, set differentiated activities for different groups of children, and how to structure lessons for paired working so that pupils are using both tablets and practical equipment, while talking about their learning.

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