3 “Flipping” Great Pancake Day Maths Activities for KS2

August 25, 2023 | 2 min read

Sophie Waterman-Smith

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 Maths Facts

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.

KS2 Topical Maths Problems for Spring Term

25 Maths investigations linked to calendar dates, designed to develop reasoning and problem solving in your pupils

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Pancake Related 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.

BONUS ACTIVITY: 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?

Enjoyed this? We’ve worked hard to “squeeze” a bunch more fun Maths investigations KS2 for your class on our topical Maths blog, enjoy!

Here’s our complete list of topical maths investigations for year 5 and year 6.

Autumn Term maths investigations year 6 and year 5

Spring Term maths investigations year 6 and year 5

Summer term maths investigations year 6 and year 5

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 don’t come round every year…

DO YOU HAVE PUPILS WHO NEED MORE SUPPORT IN MATHS?

Every week Third Space Learning’s maths specialist tutors support thousands of students across hundreds of schools with weekly primary school tuition designed to plug gaps and boost progress.

Since 2013 these personalised one to one lessons have helped over 150,000 primary and secondary students become more confident, able mathematicians.

Learn about the emphasis on building a positive maths mindset or request a personalised quote for your school to speak to us about your school’s needs and how we can help.