Year 5 - investigating new types of numbers

What is 64? As Year 5 learned this week, the answer could be a square number, a cube number, a composite number, a multiple of 16, or a number with 7 factors - there are a lot of different ways of thinking about it! Year 5 have acquired a lot of new mathematical vocabulary over the last few days, and are starting to use it to describe patterns that they are finding in class.

Each new concept has been explored in different ways - we used arrays to make square numbers, multilink to create cube numbers, and a method invented by a Greek mathematician over two thousand years ago (the sieve of Eratosthenes) to find prime numbers. Our Year 5 mathematicians loved the challenge of finding squares and cubes of increasingly large numbers, which tested their multiplication skills, and their construction skills when using multilink. The beauty of maths is in finding links, connections and patterns, and the children have spent the last part of the week exploring which square numbers can be made by adding prime numbers, which numbers are also the sum of their factors (perfect numbers) , and investigating whether every whole number could be written as the sum of four or fewer square numbers. Numbers really are magical, when you see their connections.