Step by step: a cross curricular activity using pedometers

To help young people achieve the four capacities of Curriculum for Excellence, to become successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors to society and at work, young people must have opportunities to solve problems in context.

Often in the maths classroom, skills are learned in isolation and contexts can be artificial.  Although many mathematical skills are learned so that we can access higher level thinking, bringing pleasure and excitement in their own right, equally young people have a right to ask 'When will I ever use this?'. 

Good numeracy skills can bring ‘added value’ to many areas of work and play, for example in finance, travel, construction, health and fitness. 

In schools, numeracy skills can often be assumed and not thoroughly explored in these areas.  We need to consider how to help learners become more confident in using numeracy to enable them to enjoy making effective choices in their lives.

Encouraging healthy living

The step by step activities, which are suitable for use in late primary or early secondary, place an emphasis on enhancing understanding in the area of healthy living by:

• building confidence in taking measurements
• working with large numbers
• making reasoned evaluations of data
• applying critical thinking in new contexts.

Taking steps to keep fit is a high priority, especially when we take less exercise in our daily lives. But how can we measure our daily activity? 

We are used to measuring in other contexts – we weigh ourselves to see how heavy we are, we count our money to see how much we have. 

A pedometer will help us to see how many steps we walk in a day. There are also opportunities to answer some interesting questions about gender and distances.

Learning and teaching

The resources consist mainly of teacher’s notes, to enable the teacher to ask some open questions which will make young people think about their own experiences and help them organise their responses.

Five lessons with guide timings are included.  They could be used by primary teachers or teachers of maths, PSE, PE or ASN in secondary schools. Each lesson involves some physical activity, although the final lesson introduces a more prolonged activity. 

The numeracy skills involved should be quite familiar to pupils. Group or pair work with sharing should enable mixed ability groups to participate.  This is an opportunity to embed numeracy skills which may have already been taught.

Also included is a PowerPoint presentation which accompanies the activities. This enables the teacher to use slides selectively to assist with delivery of information and may reduce the need for photocopying sheets. Some simple spreadsheets have been included to assist with the collection of data.

Step by step: Teacher resources