Mathematics across the curriculum

Mathematics has traditionally been taught through a subject based approach. The advent of the National Curriculum has brought about a need for change to a topic based cross‐curricular strategy, to deal with mathematics in real‐life problems. One way of approaching this with young children is to introduce an imaginary world in which they are asked to help solve the open ended real‐life problems of the inhabitants. In this way the children are able not only to pose further problems arising from the initial task, but also to develop their own strategies to the solution of them, linking across the curriculum as they do so. In this way children appear capable of posing and solving problems at a much earlier age.