6 “Flipping” Great Pancake Day Maths Activities For A KS2 Class Who Look Forward To Shrove Tuesday All Year Long!

Shrove Tuesday is here, so get stuck in with some “flipping” great Pancake Day maths activities to use in your KS2 primary school classroom or at home.

At Third Space we do our best to squeeze every bit of maths we can from any event celebrated by pupils and this is no exception. Here are some fun facts and engaging Pancake Day maths activities to use and adapt for your classrooms or at home. Pupils can find it hard to relate a lot of mathematical concepts to the real world, especially at primary level, but hopefully ideas may inspire you to bring a bit of fun and real life into maths whilst teaching in an engaging way!

Fun Pancake Day maths facts for KS2

Did you know…?

• The largest pancake ever made was in Rochdale, Manchester in 1994. It was 15.01m in diameter, 2.5cm thick and weighed 3 tonnes.
• The record for the most number of pancake flips in 1 minute is 140.
• The highest pancake toss came to 9.47m in New York in 2010.
• The most pancakes ever made in 1 hour is 1093 and this challenge was completed by an American restaurant owner in 2013.

Fun Pancake Day Maths Investigations for KS2

1. Shrove Tuesday Investigation

Read the following information to help you answer question 1:

A pancake house made 264 pancakes on Shrove Tuesday. Jack’s family ate 2.5 times as many pancakes as Lara’s family. Ali’s family ate 1/8 of the total number of pancakes made. Lara’s family ate 2/3 of the amount that Ali’s family ate.

Use these clues to work out how to answer question 2:

• Person 1 ate three times as many pancakes as person 3.
• Person 2 ate the same number of pancakes as person 1.
• Person 3 ate 2 fewer pancakes than person 5.
• Person 4 ate 2 more pancakes than person 5.
• Person 5 ate 5 pancakes.

Questions

1. How many pancakes did Jack’s family eat?
2. How many pancakes did each of the five people in Ali’s family eat?

2. Pancake on your head race

Ask your pupils to walk across the playground – or alternatively the classroom – with a pancake on their head. Make them walk quite quickly. Each time they drop the pancake they must measure the distance from where it fell to the start. Each time they complete the distance add another pancake to the stack.

Extension task

Ask your pupils to work out how many times they would need to walk across the area without dropping the pancake in order, or work out the average distance walked before dropping pancake for the whole class.

3. Pancake sauce combinations

Billy wants to have 2 sauces on his pancakes. Use the information below to investigate the different combinations of 2 sauces he could have:

A Pancake House offers 6 pancake sauces:

• Vanilla
• Strawberry
• Chocolate
• Toffee
• Lemon
• Maple

Other Pancake Day activities to use in your classroom

The Estimation Game

Use the fun facts above to play an estimation game with pupils. You could ask them ‘What is the weight of the largest pancake ever made?’ Or to ‘Estimate the most number of pancakes ever made in one hour.’

Get your pupils to write down their estimations individually. They could then compare and discuss their answers with a partner/their tables or the class answers could be gathered together and used for data collection and/or to find averages from their data.

The Largest Pancake Calculation

As an activity for more able learners or as an extension activity, provide and explain to your pupils the formulae for the circumference and area of a circle, then get them to work out these calculations for the largest pancake ever made in Rochdale.

The Perfect Pancake

As homework, ask your pupils to share their parents’ recipes for pancakes. Then use these recipes to find the perfect pancake recipe. Pupils could do this either by discussing and debating which recipes they believe are the best and providing reasons for their answers or they could use averages from the class data to calculate the perfect pancake.

The Pancake Ratio & Percentage Problems

There are a lot of different ways you could bring ratio into your pancake day maths activities, and you can use these problems below as a source of inspiration:

• If a recipe calls for one cup of flour, one cup of milk and one cup of eggs to make enough pancake batter for 2 people, how many cups of flour will be required to make enough pancakes for 6 people?
• A French crepe recipe suggests a ratio of flour to milk to eggs of 2:3:2, if Chef Jean-Claude uses 12 cups of milk, how many cups of eggs should he use?
• Brazilian chef Ronaldinho is making Amazonian cassava starch pancakes (really healthy), the recipe he has been given by his Avó (grandma) says the mixture should be 25% starch and the rest should be made from water. If he makes 500 ml of batter, how much of the liquid should be water?

More KS2 maths investigations available for Year 5 and Year 6

We’ve got more fun KS2 maths investigations, all free for UK primary schools based around the following key events in a primary school during Autumn, Spring and Summer Term.

To get the complete set download the latest versions of our topical maths problems:

• Autumn Term topical KS2 maths investigations and problems
• Festive topical KS2 maths investigations and problems
• Spring Term topical KS2 maths investigations and problems
• Summer Term topical KS2 maths investigations and problems

Or follow any links below

Autumn Term maths investigations year 6 and year 5

• Autumn maths activities
• Halloween maths activities
• Bonfire Night maths activities
• Christmas maths activities

Spring Term maths investigations year 6 and year 5

• Heart Month maths activities
• Pancake Day Maths activities (Shrove Tuesday maths activities)
• World Book Day Maths activities
• International Women’s Day Maths activities
• British Science Week Maths activities
• Holi Maths activities
• Easter/Lent Maths activities

Summer term maths investigations year 6 and year 5

• Share-a-Story Month activities
• Walk to School Week activities
• Child Safety Week activities
• Sports Day maths activities

And if that’s not enough we’ve even got maths activities for Year 5 and Year 6 for events you’re likely to celebrate in primary school but their dates can change from year to year.

• Ramadan maths activities
• Red Nose Day maths activities
• World Cup maths activities
• Election maths
• Jubilee or Coronation maths activities
• Football maths activities (UEFA cup or FA cup)

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Enjoyed this? We’ve worked hard to “squeeze” a bunch more fun maths investigations for your KS2 class on our introduction to topical maths article.