Articles & Videos

Learning from home: iMaths Years 1–6

Paper airplane

Subscribe to our newsletters

Receive teaching resources and tips, exclusive special offers, useful product information and more!

Subscribe

Back to articles & videos

Learning from home: iMaths Years 1–6

iMaths 11/5/20

“students-completing-imaths-investigation“

Note: iMaths is in its final year and will be discontinued at the end of 2024. If you’re looking for a primary maths resource written for the Australian Curriculum Version 9.0, explore Maths Trek.

The COVID-19 pandemic has meant that teachers are constantly having to adapt to a changing learning environment. To help you navigate this new way of teaching, we’ve put together tips on how you can use your iMaths resources to facilitate online learning, and collated a range of additional maths activities that you can pass on to parents or guardians.

Tips for Investigations

With teacher guidance (and a little bit of help from parents and guardians) Investigations can be successfully completed at home.

Where possible, ensure students follow the steps outlined in the Investigation Teaching Plan to complete the Investigation. On occasion, you may need to tweak the way you teach these steps. For example, to ‘Introduce the Investigation’ you can pre-record a video that explains the Investigation context, and send this to your students. To ensure students are familiar with the ‘Essential Word List’ you can send students a literacy exercise that requires them to find the meaning of the words and use each word in a sentence.

Select appropriate Investigations

We’ve handpicked Investigations from each year level that are ideal to be completed at home – noting that some households may not have access to a printer.

Year 6
With printer: Investigation 11 Octi-origami
Tip: Students can use white paper or scrap paper if they don’t have coloured paper. Encourage students to find some interesting origami patterns online —there are thousands to choose from!

Without printer: Investigation 4 Practice makes perfect
Tip: Students will need to make their own coin catching record sheet. Encourage students to ask another family member to join in and perfect their coin catching skills.

Year 5
With printer: Investigation 6 Never a cross word
Tip: Provide students with some simple crosswords to complete or ask them to find some of their own to complete and reference.

Without printer: Investigation 3 Down the drain
Tip: Ask students to investigate the water usage of their own household. For example, look at a water bill to find out how much water the household uses, check taps inside and outside to make sure none drip, and think about they ways water usage could be cut down.

Year 4
With printer: Investigation 1 Ripper rides

Without printer: Investigation 3 Plenty of pikelets
Tip: If students don’t have the ingredients to make pikelets in their home, encourage them to make something else with the ingredients they do have. If cooking is not an option then students could watch a video of a chef preparing their favourite meal and take note of the ingredients used.

Year 3
With printer: Investigation 8 Picture perfect patterns

Without printer: Investigation 1 How Do I Measure Up
Tip: Students will need to ask a family member to help them measure their arm span, leg length etc.

Year 2
With printer: Investigation 12 Paint it!

Without printer: Investigation 9 Waterwise me

Year 1
With printer: Investigation 2 Let’s roll
Tip: If students don’t have a die at home, suggest a cube net template they can print from home and construct—there are dozen of free examples online.

Without printer: Investigation 3 Biggest drink

Additional Reminder: Update your iPlanner to reflect any changes in the Topics or Investigations you’re conducting through Term 2. That way when school returns to normal, you can continue with other Investigations and ensure that all Topics are covered by the close of the school year.

Assess the Investigation

When you complete your assessment, make adjustments to allow for the fact the Investigation was completed at home.

To assess the Understanding, Fluency and Problem-Solving rows of the Rubric, ask students to record their Investigation progress. Students can submit photographs or a video of their in-progress and completed Investigation, along with any data, graphs or mathematical workings.

To assess the Reasoning rows, schedule a phone or video call and ask the Communicating and Reflecting questions from the Investigation Teaching Plan. Remember to adjust these questions, or add extra questions, if the scope of the Investigation was altered to suit the students’ home learning environment. If you’re unable to have a one-on-one conference with a student, email the questions to the parents and have the student respond in writing (or request a transcript written by the parents on the student’s behalf).

Inform parents of the Inquiry

Remind parents that the Inquiry task is an optional extra that students can complete if they have the time and need an extra challenge.

Tips for Topics

Just like the Investigations you would run at school, ensure you schedule the associated Topics needed to complete the Investigation. Remind parents that even though the Investigation is introduced from the outset, students will need to complete all associated Topics before tackling the Investigation itself. If you’re scheduling additional Topics to be completed during Term 2, inform parents which Topics are associated with the Investigation and which Topics are not.

Teach the concept

Where possible we recommend you continue to explicitly teach the Topics in a format available to you, whether it be live video conferencing the lesson with your students or pre-recording a mini teaching video. However, we understand this may not be possible for all students and all lessons.

In cases where parents will be assisting with their child’s learning, inform parents of the structure of the iMaths Student Book Topic pages. Encourage parents to use the prompts and examples from the first part of each Student Book Topic page to describe the maths concept, then work together with their children on the Try this activity.

Complete the activities

Have students complete the activities in their physical Student Book, or from printed Student Book pages available at iMaths Kids.

Distribute Differentiation Tasks

Don’t forget to use the Differentiation Tasks available within each Topic of your teacher access to iMaths Online (these are not available to students, so that you can decide which activity is right for each student). Each Topic includes a Support, Consolidation and Extension task along with answers. Distribute the appropriate tasks to students via email or your school’s learning management system.

Additional Reminder: If students have a Tracker Book at home, have them complete the relevant Topic pages at the conclusion of the Investigation.

Additional activities to pass onto parents

Parents can use the following activities at anytime throughout the term. They are great alternatives if parents and students are struggling with a particular Topic that the teacher has assigned.

Online activities

Students can log in to the student site to access a range of interactive tools and resources at anytime. Along with the Investigations and Student Book Topics scheduled by the teacher, students can also:

Watch the Problem Solving Strategy Videos: iMaths teaches students 10 common problem-solving strategies that students will use time and again to solve various maths problems. For each problem-solving strategy, there’s an engaging video that they can watch anytime to refresh their problem-solving skills.

Visit the weblinks: Many Investigations include a suite of collated weblinks that students can use to discover more about the concepts explored in the Investigation.

Play interactive games: iMaths includes a range of interactive games that are a fun way for students to consolidate number concepts. Each year level has a selection of games to play such as 100 Board, Gridlock, Numbers Up and Track It.

Offline activities

iMaths is all about fostering a love of maths by seeking it out in everyday contexts. Parents are encouraged to look for maths in their daily lives and discuss, analyse, estimate and make inferences wherever the opportunity presents. Here are some simple activities to get parents and students started:

Make a tally or graph: Collect data from around the house to create a tally or graph. For example, the colour of shirts in a wardrobe, birthday month of relatives or the number of socks in each house member’s sock drawer.

Create a map: Create a map of the bedroom or kitchen areas of the house, or if time permits, the house in its entirety.

Monthly mayhem: Cut out the number squares from a calendar month. Place them in a container. Tip the numbers out of the container and order them as quickly as possible. Change things up by arranging the numbers in ascending and descending order.

Plan your day: Draw up a daily timetable before starting the day to show times for various activities, lunch breaks and free time.

String treasure hunt: Find three things around the house that are the same length as a random length of string and draw them. Vary the activity by finding three things shorter than or longer than the string.

Guess and write: Take turns to trace a numeral (to 100) on your partner’s back. The partner writes the number they think it is, in words, on a piece of paper.

Let’s go shopping: Set up a shop using empty food packaging, small toys and novelties items. Price items exactly 5c, 10c, 20c, 50c, $1 and $2. A cutlery tray makes a great cash register.

Water play: Collect an assortment of containers of different sizes and shapes, for example: ice-cream containers, buckets, teapots, baking trays, water bottles, jugs, litre bottles, eggcups or margarine containers. Guess how many cups of water it takes to fill each container. Sort containers from those with greatest capacity to least capacity.

Domino operations: Place dominoes in a bucket. Select an operation (addition, subtraction, multiplication or division). Pull out a domino and say the addition fact shown by the dots. Write the addition fact and answer.

Target 50: In pairs, take turns to throw a die. Add the results of each throw using a calculator. The first person to reach exactly 50 wins.

Inside out: Carefully pull apart a cardboard box, such as a muesli bar box, to investigate which 2D shapes it is comprised of. Design and colour your own brand of muesli bar on the inside and put it back together inside out.

Weather watch: Use a calendar page to record daily weather by drawing simple pictures to show fine, cloudy, stormy or rainy. At the end of the month, discuss how many days were a certain condition and determine which kind of weather occurred most often.

Seasons charts: Create charts for the different seasons; summer, autumn, winter and spring. Write the months for each season, draw pictures or cut out magazine images to show the weather and special events in each of the seasons.

Modelling: Use modelling clay, plasticine or play-dough to make models of 3D objects such as a cube, cylinder, pyramid, cone, sphere or rectangular prism. Discuss the number of faces, corners and edges.

Feet first: Trace around each person’s shoe in your family and cut it out. Glue to a baseline. Label with names. Then write observations. What did you find out? For example, Jack’s feet are the smallest.

Bingo: Ask two or more players to draw up a simple nine frame bingo card. Ask each player to choose any nine numbers between, for example, 40 and 60 and write these in their bingo frame. Call out random numbers from 40 to 60. The first player to have crossed out all their numbers, calls out ‘bingo’.

More iMaths articles & videos