Natural Numbers excursion
High school maths
Take your students on an adventurous natural maths journey they will not forget!
This excursion includes a series of hands-on problem-solving challenges that take place during a fieldwork journey through the dramatic rock outcrops, rivers, wetlands and forest of Lane Cove National Park.
The excursion has been structured specifically to exercise your student’s abilities in working mathematically (the syllabus process skills of communicating, problem solving, reasoning, understanding and fluency).
Maximum 4 classes per day.
Learning activities
Schools who book this program have a choice of which challenge activities they would like their students to undertake. Teachers select the activities which work best for their stage 4-5 programming and desired level of rigour for their students.
All of the challenge activities exercise student’s ability to work mathematically (the syllabus process skills of communicating, problem solving, reasoning, understanding and fluency) in adventurous natural contexts.
Syllabus-specific content areas covered in the challenges include number plane, measurement, decimals, scale, length, area, time, equations, data collection/representation, statistics, properties of triangles, ratios and trigonometry.
The fieldwork challenges range in complexity and rigour from the very fun (eg navigation challenge that lead to a safe blindfolded string-walk adventure) to the very open-ended and challenging (eg coming up with a strategy that uses compass, measuring equipment and markers to determine the width of the Lane Cove River)
Sample worksheet (stage 5 activities)
All the necessary physical and digital measuring and processing equipment is provided.
Students work in small groups to tackle challenges and solve problems. A worksheet is provided for each activity. Student groups will record a short, informative ideo-blog on iPads in which they explain (using mathematical terminology) how they tackled and solved each challenge, as well as making suggestions for improvement. These videos can be shared with your school for use in feedback, reporting and parent-teacher meetings.
This program can run with up to 4 classes a day.
