Many children like to follow a team or a player and they will collect clippings and photos and print off information from the internet about their sports heroes. It is a worthwhile thing to encourage this as it can support both their literacy and mathematics learning.
Large scrapbooks, newspapers, and glue sticks are reasonably priced and are the only things you need to start a Sport Maths Book.
Encourage your child to find and clip out tables, graphs and charts about standings, results and other information. Ask them to explain what the numbers mean and what they can figure out from the graphs.
Children can research their favourite players’ stats like birthdates, ages, weights, heights, personal bests, or season results. Encourage them to compare players and teams mathematically.
Who is older? By how how much? If he started playing when he was 19 how long has he been playing?
What does this mean: 78% success as goal shoot?
How many points will they need to get to the top of the table?
If the world record is 23.5 m how much further does she need to throw to beat that record?
What can you tell about this cricketer from the wagon wheel graph?
Look at the weightlifters' results. What is the difference between the first and last place?
When New Zealand competes in an international event such as The Olympics or a World Cup there are usually lots of interesting tables and special pages produced in newspapers with medal standings and other statistics. Ask your child to do some of their calculations and estimations or predictions in their scrapbook and then the scrapbook can also become a souvenir of an event or a season.