These activities are part of our Primary collections, which are problems grouped by topic.

Digit addition
Try out this number trick. What happens with different starting numbers? What do you notice?

How many?

Snail one hundred
In this game, you throw a dice and move counters along the snail's body and in a spiral around the snail's shell. It is about understanding tens and ones.

Biscuit decorations

Writing digits


Buzzy bee
Buzzy Bee was building a honeycomb. She decorated the honeycomb with a pattern using numbers. Can you discover Buzzy's pattern and fill in the empty cells for her?


Robot monsters
Use these head, body and leg pieces to make Robot Monsters which are different heights.

Same length trains


Tug of war
Can you use the numbers on the dice to reach your end of the number line before your partner beats you?


Two-digit targets
You have a set of the digits from 0 to 9. Can you arrange these in the five boxes to make two-digit numbers as close to the targets as possible?

I like ...

Count the digits
In this investigation we are going to count the number of 1s, 2s, 3s etc in numbers. Can you predict what will happen?


Largest even

All change
There are three versions of this challenge. The idea is to change the colour of all the spots on the grid. Can you do it in fewer throws of the dice?

How would we count?
An activity centred around observations of dots and how we visualise number arrangement patterns.

That number square


Five steps to 50
Use five steps to count forwards or backwards in 1s or 10s to get to 50. What strategies did you use?


Eightness of eight

6 beads
If you put three beads onto a tens/ones abacus you can make the numbers 3, 30, 12 or 21. What numbers can be made with six beads?

Missing middles

Making sticks

Light the lights
Investigate which numbers make these lights come on. What is the smallest number you can find that lights up all the lights?

What's in a name?
Here's a very elementary code that requires young children to read a table, and look for similarities and differences.

Grouping goodies
Pat counts her sweets in different groups and both times she has some left over. How many sweets could she have had?