Playground markings are a trusty ally in making pupils happy and keeping them healthy.
With their vibrant designs, playground markings can endorse activity, as well as be used as an effective tool for teaching.
Children love vibrant colours, and when you combine that with a playground’s space and fresh air, as well as a few educational materials, your students will be learning everything they need to know, including numbers, without even realising it.
Let’s look at a few playground markings and games you can play with your students to encourage a love for numbers.
Learn fractions together
Learning fractions can now be much more engaging than ever before. The fraction circle playground marking is a vibrant and fun take on fraction learning that will help your pupils learn colours too.
Ask questions like, what fraction of a circle is yellow? What percentage is that? What fraction of the circle is blue? Which is bigger, two-thirds (⅔) or six-sevenths (6/7)? Learning fractions is so much easier with a colourful playground to keep the pupils’ attention, whilst removing them from the pressure of the classroom.
An example of a fun fraction game that you can play together with the class is called Name The Fraction:
- Split your pupils into teams, with an equal number of players in each, and take on the role of the “fraction master”.
- You will call out colours every round, which you can either add or subtract from a fraction circle.
- In each round, one participant from each team must name the fraction, with or without the named colours.
- You could either have the participants race to call the answer first or take turns until all, but one, make a mistake, with the final student winning the round for their team.
- The team with the most rounds won after all pupils take their turn, will be victorious.
- Shuffle the members of each team and go again for another quick and fun game.
To make this game more entertaining and social, allow teams to give advice to their participants for the round! To add physical activity and even more fun to the game, you can add jumping within the fraction circle, before calling the fraction.
Multiplication and division never have to be boring again!
Using playground markings to introduce multiplication and division is one more strategy for inspiring a love of numbers in pupils. Number hunt is an easy way to put your vivid multiplication grid marking to use:
- Cover most or all numbers on the grid with paper. You can make two or more teams out of the class.
- Assign a different colour to each team and give each a single marker of the same shade to use.
- Line up the team members in single column, a few meters away from the grid where the start will be. Mark their starting position with chalk or you could even use one of our neat throw line markings. The coloured marker is given to the first pupil in the column.
- To start the hunt, the pupils holding the markers of their teams need to rush to the grid, solve an equation and write the result on the paper located above the number on the grid. Then they will run back, pass the marker to the next pupil in line and go all the way to the back of the column waiting for their turn to come again.
- Each player can solve only one equation at a time. The game ends when all the papers have been filled.
Scoring: Correct answers are worth 1 point, whilst incorrect ones are -1. You could make scoring more interesting – for example, add the sum for correct answers and subtract for wrong ones. If the team solved 9×9, they get 18 points, while getting 7×7 wrong would be -14 points. This will introduce higher risk but will also offer higher rewards for teams who go for harder equations.
Counting is much more interesting with playground markings
Hopscotch is the perfect game to teach your pupils how to count. Every break time or lunch time will be a blast for the children thanks to engaging, colourful markings that are simple to customise, and are a fun and energetic activity. Even two or more people can play it simultaneously with our 4-Way Hopscotch!
The snail, the dragon, and the caterpillar maths markings are another colourful resource for learning how to count. Just pick one of your pupils and call out numbers for them to walk or jump on. Skip numbers, call them in reverse, or choose only even or odd numbers. Your imagination is the limit!
Snakes & Ladders is also a popular way of teaching numbers. How to make it more engaging? Just make the pupils play the role of their pawns! There are many other ways of tweaking Snakes & Ladders to offering a more active way of outdoor learning.
Our clock designs are great for teaching your youngest pupils how to tell the time and give them the chance to become the clock themselves. Just choose two of your pupils, one for each hand of the clock, and ask them to make the time you announce.
Learn more about how to help your pupils develop a love for numbers, and for many other fantastic educational markings, be sure to check out our wide range of eye-popping designs!