Maths Explorers - an introduction

I run a small weekly maths session on a Saturday morning.  It is certainly small (10-14 people, helpers and parents included), and weekly but some might question how much of it is maths.  We usually play a number game or do a challenge, look at some mathematical phenomenon and then try out different puzzles and play a team game.  The children are predominantly home educated and range in age from 6 - 10.  There is a facebook page which hosts a short summary of each session and other information or suggestions that we have.
We facilitate different types of activity.  We nearly always do something that involves number to start with but occasionally we work with properties of shape instead.  This might be a challenge or a game and usually is collaborative in nature.
For the next stage, we present something that elicits questions and discussions.  This might be a diagram, shape, puzzle or anything else.  This gives us a chance to highlight our 5 key values and talk about examples where they have been used.

This sets off a challenge or activity where children work with us, each other or their parents.  We encourage them to talk about anything that they notice and some require more encouragement than others.  It's great when they get excited about something that they've seen and show us all how it works.

And our sessions don't really have any more of a goal than this.  That children experience and enjoy mathematical thinking once a week with other like minded children.  This is a challenge for us a lot of the time as packaging and selling activities and ideas can be quite hit or miss and nothing is guaranteed to work or work a second time.
Saying that there are some firm favourites in our sessions.  All of the children love building with multi-link cubes or plus-plus and building different structures.  Games with hexagonal grids are also popular, especially Hex that has been adopted and popularised by two of our members.  We have a number of logic puzzles that parents usually enjoy playing with too.
In this blog, I plan to evaluate how sessions went, reflect on planning needs as well as write about development of other projects within roots2grow.org venture.