Use physical starters to math lessons to begin sessions on a positive note, engaging students and getting the brain warmed up. Write questions on the surface of a soccer ball; use a marker pen so that you can wipe off and change the questions or write questions on sticky labels that you can peel away. Have students stand or sit in a circle. Throw or roll the ball to a student. When she catches the ball she must answer the question that is facing her. She then throws or rolls the ball on. Alternatively, throw a ball or beanbag around the circle, calling out a math question each time. Whoever catches the ball must answer the question. If she gets it wrong she is out.
Take your class out onto the school playing fields. Separate students into groups. Give each group a sporting activity to do -- skipping, throwing and catching a ball or running around the field, for example. Students must devise a way to collect data; how many times is the ball caught in one minute? How long does it take each group member to run around the field? This data is used as a basis for introducing and working out the concepts of mean, median and mode; what was the median number of skips in one minute, for example.
Use real facts about sport to engage your class in the topic of representing and analyzing data and learning about probability, statistics and percentages. Use the sports pages of newspapers or online resources to find out facts about a team's performance in any sport your students choose. Have students work in groups to investigate and analyze this data, representing it in bar charts, graphs and pie charts. Students could choose to represent data using computer software and each group could present its findings to the rest of the class.
Engage your students with a real-life based math project that everyone can be involved in. Present students with a sporting event -- a baseball or soccer game, for example. Then have students work in groups to investigate one aspect of producing that event. One group could be responsible for ticketing and attendance, for example, another for merchandising or food and drink. Each group has to investigate costs and work out aspects such as how to make a profit. The group working on ticketing, for example, would need to think about capacity, cost of producing tickets and how much would need to be charged in order to make a profit. Groups would need to liaise with each other and the whole class could then bring their ideas and calculations together.