Maths help for parents of children aged 5 to 11
Counting game: colour ten fish
Brighten up the ocean! The next in our colouring series. It’s now time to explore the underwater world and colour 10 fish. Just as before, it’s one click for red, two clicks for blue and three clicks for gold.
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The vocabulary that young children are expected to know is quite challenging and none more so than in Shape and Space. Children are expected to be able to explore shapes, talk about their properties and know some quite tricky names of 2D and 3D shapes, including sphere, pyramid and cone.
This knowledge can only be gained with plenty of experience of handling and playing with shapes – don’t forget, the kitchen is a great place to be if you want to get the names of shapes into the conversation!
The first in our subtraction worksheets. Pure and simple subtraction of numbers less than 10. No number lines or pictures to count. Just two worksheets with ten sums each.
Some quick revision of addition, working all answers out ‘in your head’.
By now children should have a wide range of techniques for adding mentally. One example on this maths worksheet is to add 29 by adding 30 and subtracting one. Also here is some revision of the language of addition: increase, total, how many altogether.
Another worksheet with a ‘wheel’ of questions to practise subtraction of whole tens. year 5’s should find this quite easy and it is worth considering what approach they take to finding all the possible questions.
Start with a high number and go through the spokes to make a sum eg 130 – 80.
By year 5 children will certainly have come across negative numbers so there is no reason why they could not work out a question such as 130 – 160 as -30. Others will say that this negative sum ‘can not be done’ which is a correct way of looking at it if they are using the traditional pencil and paper style of thinking for subtraction.
This is another area of maths that children meet very early in their lives. Standard units of measurement (eg metres or kilos) are not taught at this stage – it would be pointless as many children are unable to count up to 100 or 1000.
Rather it is about comparing things – objects which are taller, wider, heavier, longer etc than other objects.
Get the vocabulary right at this age and they will have little problems with measurement later.
Here’s a very straight forward little revision for children to practise their counting on in the hundreds. In Year 3 many children will still be using their fingers to count on whilst others will be learning to add the number using the facts they already know. As most of these questions cross the next tens boundary this is not so easy.
Help Jim colour in the stars he has got for good work!
Click in a star:
Once for red.
Twice for blue.
Three times for Gold.
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Getting to know pairs of numbers which total 100
Getting to know pairs of numbers which total 100 is quite tricky and often will be ‘worked out’ from other knowledge. However, some certainly can be learnt, including these pairs which all have 5 as the units.
Watch out for a common mistake when doing this. Many children will make the answer 10 too many, for example saying that 65 needs to be added to 45 to make 100.
Again, if the answers are not known the easiest way to work them out is to count on.
World Maths Day has begun! Good luck to everyone taking part. World top students and World Top Classes can be viewed now at World Maths Day.
Whingate Primary doing well!