for curious children, aged 4 to 10
Petals on a daisy, slices of pizza, stripes on a zebra. Numbers and shapes are hiding everywhere, so let’s go and find them.
pick a game!
Six little games, each with an easy level and harder ones. Get an answer right first time and you win a star. Can’t read yet? Tap the speaker to hear the question.
Stars are saved on this device only.
look around you
Flowers, bees, food and even time itself run on numbers and shapes. Here are six places to spot them.
The seeds in a sunflower sit in spirals. Count them and you’ll often find 34 turning one way and 55 the other. Both are Fibonacci numbers: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55… Each one is the two before it added together.
try it Find a pinecone and count its spirals. You might get 8 one way and 13 the other.
A hexagon has six sides, and hexagons fit together with no gaps in between. That lets bees store the most honey while using the least wax.
18, because 6 + 6 + 6 = 18.
Draw a line down the middle of a butterfly and each half is a mirror of the other. That’s called symmetry. Your face is nearly symmetrical too!
try it Paint blobs on one half of a sheet of paper, fold it shut, press, then open it up.
Water freezes into tiny six-sided crystals, so a snowflake’s arms come in sixes. No two snowflakes are exactly alike, but they all follow the same rule.
24, because 4 × 6 = 24.
Cut a pizza into 8 equal slices and each slice is one eighth. Eat 2 slices and you’ve eaten two eighths, which is the same as one quarter.
2 slices each, because 8 ÷ 4 = 2.
There are 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour. That idea comes from the Babylonians, who counted in sixties about 4,000 years ago.
30, because half of 60 is 30.
for parents and teachers
Stairs, peas, buttons, birds on a wire. Counting real things out loud, every day, is where number sense starts.
Point out the circle of a plate, the rectangle of a door, the hexagons on a football. Names first; sides and corners follow.
Recipes are full of weighing and measuring, and cutting a cake fairly is a fractions lesson in disguise.
Snakes and ladders, dominoes and card games all practise counting, adding and comparing numbers.
Ten minutes a day beats an hour on a Sunday. Stop while it’s still fun, so they want to come back.
Say “you worked that out” rather than “you’re clever”. Mistakes are part of learning, not a sign of being “not a maths person”.
No ads, no accounts, no tracking. Just maths.