On Wednesday 29th June Coombeshead welcomed 52 pupils from 8 different primaries for a morning of Maths challenge and competition.

In teams of 4, the year 5 students competed against each other across 3 different tasks. Firstly, they had to identify and draw all 12 pentominoes: shapes made up of 5 squares. Then they used their number skills to add together the longest chain of positive whole numbers starting with 1. Some groups chose to write all their numbers out, some quickly realised that they could just keep on adding bigger and bigger numbers to their total.

The final round saw the teams rushing to answer 20 quiz questions, this time in pairs. Like for example, “My sister was 10 years old when I was born in 2010. How old will she be when she is exactly double my age?”

All 52 pupils, their year 7 helpers and all the staff packed out M5 to hear the results, only to discover that 2 teams had gone through the whole competition without dropping any points! A tie-break was hastily arranged, and won by St Catherine’s Primary who managed to identify 1,000,000 as a very large square number. Well done to St Catherine’s who went away with the trophy, but thank you to all the year 5 pupils from all the different schools who came to do some Maths at Coombeshead. We hope you had fun and look forward to seeing you again soon!