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Maths activities for sports day and the Olympic Games

Monday, 20 June 2016
Having maths activities linked to sports day is a great way to inspire children and put maths into a real-life context. There are opportunities to use small numbers with EYFS/KS1, calculate with 3-digit numbers for the track events for KS2 and try problem solving with weights. There is also a free to download sporting logic mystery.
Some of the fun of teaching is linking the maths to real-life events and creating your own maths activities.  At the end of the summer term you can use sports day to consolidate and revise the concepts, skills and procedures taught throughout the whole year. 

However, you might like to make it the theme for your main teaching focus. In which case start with the learning objectives and find the most appropriate aspect of sports day for the context. When planning your maths for next year you could make sure that certain aspects of measurement are taught in June/July near sports day as lengths, heights and distances, as well as mass, are easy to link to maths. 

However if time is short it is handy to have some ideas that you can use at short notice. 


The 2016 Olympic Games will be held in Rio, Brazil in August.



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I have brought together sports day maths activities written previously for the London Olympic Games in 2012 and the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in 2014.
Related articles

Plan your own olympic maths activities
Start with data from the event or start from the maths objective and adapt a maths problem.

Maths, the Olympics and NRICH
A great website with lots of problem solving activities linked to sports day and the Olympics

Maths on the athletics track .

EYFS/ KS1

The numbers 1-8 on the start of a track are a great opportunity to do some body maths.  If you don't have a track outside at school, use tape to make lanes on the classroom floor and write the lane numbers on A4 and stick those down too.  

Cardinal numbers

Ask different children to...

     •  stand on the number 8

      • stand on the number one more than 5

      • 
 stand on a number less than 4

      •  stand on a number between 3 and 6


As a challenge ask a child to give instructions like these, they choose a child and ask them to stand on a number - but they cannot say that number. You can have ' 1 less than', '2 more than', 'between ... and ...' written on the board to help. 

Place one child on the number 4, ask the class to give different ways to show the place of that number.
1 more than 3, 2 less than 6, between 3 and 5 ......


Ordinal numbers

Group children into 8 teams of 3-4. Give each team a large dice. One team member 'the runner' stands on a start number 1-8 on the track.  

The teams take turns to roll the dice and shout the number, their 'runner' on the track takes this number of steps forward.

Let each team roll 2-3 times and then see the position of each 'runner' using first, second,... eighth.
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KS2

Talk about the 400m running track. You could measure out 400m with a trundle wheel and get the children to run this distance, it always seems longer than you might imagine by looking at a picture of a track. 


Calculation

       •  Calculate how many times you would have to run round the track for each of these running distance events: 
400m,  800m,  1500m,  3000m,  5000m, 10000m.  What fraction of the track would you run for the 100m and 200m races?

       •  In the relay race there is a team of 4 and each athlete runs 100m  (4 x 100m relay) passing a baton to complete one 400m circuit of the track. However, if there was no limit of the number athletes in a relay team,
how many different size team can you find to compete in a 400m race? All athletes must run the same distance and each distance must be a whole number. 

[100 x 4m, 8 x 50m, 2 x 200m...]




Statistics, time, rounding and ordering decimal numbers

Here is a link to the
 times of the 100m mens final in 2012 London Olympic games.

       • Draw a block graph and ask questions about the data.

 They will have to think carefully about the scale they use for time - as there is less than half a second between the top 7 runners!

        • Round each of the times to the nearest tenth of a second, then round each time to the nearest whole second.

An interesting extension to this is to get your class into groups of 6-8.

      • Use a stop-watch to time each other run 100m and record the results.

      • Use these results to draw block graph showing the times of their teams. 
Does the time scale on the graph need to change?
What is the difference between the fastest in their group and the time of Usain Bolt?

     • Once the times of the 100m finalists were rounded to the nearest whole second 7 runners had times of 10 secs.  Set a start line, then mark and measure the distance each member of the group can run in 10 seconds. 

They will have to think about how to set up this task to mark the distance a runner is at after 10 seconds. Have a few trials to see the best method - perhaps blowing a whistle when 10 seconds is timed and marking the positions with a beanbag.

Which sport did each person play?
This maths mystery involves logic to determine the sports played by different sports players. Six clues are given, each on separate cards, and children work in small groups to solve the mystery. One method to solve the mystery is using a 4x4 grid.


This is a logic problem from my 'Mystery Worlds' series, Year 3 set.  Mysteries encourage reasoning, problem solving and working collaboratively.

Get children to work in groups, let them start with minimal help and see the methods they use to try and solve the mystery. When needed prompt them to use a 4x4 grid with the sports stars' names on one side and the sports along the top of the matrix.

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