Environmental Maths

We often talk about environmental print, but then forget we are surrounded by numbers. So, in this activity, we explore our local environment and start discovering what maths can be found.

We took a walk around the village, looking for numbers and maths and set out to discover what that could tell us about our wee village.

We quickly discovered not all streets have odd numbers on one side and even on the other. One street only had house on one side of the road so numbers ran consecutively and another, which was a dead end, seemed to have been numbered rather randomly, with house 3 next door to house 19! There is a real mystery here as to how the planners minds worked!

Then we discovered some older buildings have 4 digits on them. This reminded us the village is very old but it also helped us understand how the village changed over time. The preceptory dates back to the 1100’s but much of the construction was from the 1400’s and we have a new house in construction now. The design and age of houses helps us understand how life has changed in the village.

The post-box even had a number that looked like it changes throughout the day (so you know how many collections have been made).

Even our streetlights are numbered!

Licence plates on cars helped us do maths as we worked out how old they were.

There really was numbers to be found all over our village and each one told part of the story of our village!