Lunar New Year Maths Ideas

Description

This Lunar New Year Maths Activities Pack is a flexible, idea-rich resource designed to support meaningful maths learning across EYFS, KS1 and KS2, using engaging cultural contexts linked to Lunar New Year celebrations.

The resource provides a range of practical, open-ended maths activities that can be easily adapted to suit different year groups, abilities and curriculum units. Teachers can select activities to match current learning while embedding maths into a rich, cross-curricular theme.

Included activity ideas support:

• Problem solving and reasoning – creating maths problems linked to the 12 zodiac animals

• Word problems and literacy links – writing shopping lists for festive items (e.g. dumplings, firecrackers) and using pretend money to shop

• Number and counting – exploring the lunar calendar, counting days in celebrations and creating date-based maths problems

• Pattern and rhythm – dragon dance number patterns, clapping and skip counting in 2s, 3s and 5s

• Early patterning – repeating patterns using coloured dragon scales for younger children

• Number properties – exploring lucky and unlucky numbers and creating ‘lucky number’ maths challenges

• Sorting, data handling and statistics – dumpling sorting, tallying, graphing and creating bar charts or pie charts

• Shape, space and measure – exploring symmetry with paper lanterns and calculating perimeter and area for older pupils

• Geometry – using tangrams and 2D shapes to create zodiac animals, naming shapes or measuring angles

• Calculation and fluency – firecracker skip counting, ordering numbers and solving multiplication or division problems

• Fractions – using fortune cookies to introduce fractions or reveal word problem answers

The pack includes blank firecrackers, dumplings and fortune cookies, allowing teachers and pupils to create their own differentiated maths tasks. This makes the resource ideal for mixed-age classes, enrichment weeks or whole-school Lunar New Year learning.