We have just begun a brand new section of the site called Wet Break/Holiday Activities which will contain short, fun activities with a mathematical slant. They are aimed at those odd quarters of an hour when there’s nothing else to do, such as a wet playtime or all other work has been finished early. We start with some straightforward worksheets which are all linked to essential mathematical terms that children are expected to know. For example we have a Year 1 word search on Length, using terms such as short, high, narrow etc. Once children in year 1 have got a really good knowledge of numbers they can start to look at ordinal numbers. Whilst young children are not expected to know the term ‘ordinal numbers’ they are expected to know and understand terms such as first, second, third etc. This language can be developed during the playing of games whilst discussing who should go first, second etc. We have a simple word search using these terms. All the words can be found either going across or down – there are no diagonals. It is good practice to help with reading and writing these words as some of them are quite tricky. Also we have published other similar pages on the vocabulary of measures and months of the year for year 2 and fraction terms for year 5. Similar to the word searches are our tables number searches, but the times tables are hidden away rather than vocabulary. At the moment we have 3 times and 4 times table searches for Year 3, 6 times table for year 4 and 7 times table for Year 5. Hardest of all are our wordsnakes which are rather like a maze. Start at the arrow to find the first word, moving across or down, but not diagonally, rather like a snake. The word will not be in a straight line so might be quite tricky to find, although the first word is often given to make it a little easier. The second word follows on immediately from the first; the third word from the second and so on until each letter in the grid has been used once. The last letter of the last word is where the arrow exits the maze. Write the words down in the spaces provided. The number of dashes shows how many letters are in each word. The initial letters of the second and third words have also been given. All the words in the wordsnakes come from the vocabulary lists for the corresponding year group. Go to wet break resource for year 1