Background Attitudes of the students towards mathematics lessons are very important in terms of their success and motivation. The purpose of this study is to develop a scale for the assessment of primary school students’ attitudes towards mathematics courses in the 2nd and 3rd grades, to analyse its validity-reliability structure and to determine the students' attitudes towards mathematics. Materials and methods Emotional facial expressions are used in the scale because students can have reading and writing literacy difficulties in the 2nd and 3rd grades. The study group of this research consisted of 350 primary school students studying in the 2nd and 3rd grades of primary schools located in Northern Cyprus. Results As a result of a reliability analysis, the items of the scale were decreased to ten items, and the Cronbach alpha reliability coefficient of the scale was 0.92. Factor analysis results suggested that the scale was gathered in one factor and total variance explained was 57.796% for one factor. Conclusions In general, it is suggested that students’ attitudes towards mathematics were ‘happy ’.