Scotland’s curriculum emphasises the importance of ensuring that learners engage in interdisciplinary learning, where they use skills across different areas of content and contexts. The teaching of numeracy is the responsibility for all. Expressive Arts offers an excellent opportunity to contextualise numeracy for children and young people.

About this resource

Across the range of Expressive Arts subjects there are many opportunities to enable learners to apply their numeracy skills, whilst enjoying the exciting learning opportunities which both contexts provide.

Improvement questions

• What kind of opportunities do you already provide for learners to develop their Numeracy skills through Expressive Arts contexts?
• In what ways could you use some of the exemplars within this document with your learners?
• How could this document support professional dialogue and collaborative working between mathematics practitioners and those focusing on other curriculum areas?

Webinar

In March 2023 we held a webinar to explore this document in more detail. We discussed the rationale behind its publication, explored ways that practitioners can begin to use this with their learners, and discussed how the guidance could be used to promote conversations across departments and schools. You can watch a recording of the Numeracy in expressive arts webinar on YouTube.

How to use this resource

Contexts for learning support practitioners to consider how to make links between numeracy and expressive arts skills. This includes examples of how to extend learner’s numeracy skills through an expressive arts context. Supporting learners to apply their numeracy skills in different contexts can bring depth, breath and challenge in their understanding.

The exemplars can be used to support practitioners to consider real and relevant contexts which could be used to develop learners’ skills between numeracy and expressive arts. It can also be used to support interdisciplinary learning through planning of particular projects or school events. It could also be used to support discussions about the ways numeracy and expressive arts skills are taught and what the expectations are on learners working within each of the levels. It is important that practitioners highlight to learners the skills they are developing in both numeracy and expressive arts.

The examples included in this document should be used as suggestions and it is important to note that these may need to be adapted to make them suitable for the learners that you are working with. You might wish to include links to other Experiences and Outcomes which you are focusing on or take out certain elements which are not appropriate for your context. The examples do not need to be worked through in any order.

Where appropriate, we have included hyperlinks to resources which may support you in your planning. Several of these come from external sources which were correct at the time of publication.

Download the PDF 

PDF file: Numeracy in Expressive Arts (PDF 939 KB)

PDF file: Numeracy in Expressive Arts - Gaelic version (989 KB)