Maths news

Well, a new term is just about to begin and we have some lovely pages to help get those minds working again. Next week we are concentrating on calculating fast.

Many Year 6 children are not as confident as they should be with multiplication and with decimals so we will be publishing a straightforward maths worksheet which looks at multiplying 2-digit numbers by 1 digit, with decimals.

We will also have the second in our mini series on practising mental addition for Year 4 children. This page looks at pairs of numbers that make 60. There are 8 snappy questions followed by a task to find all the pairs of odd numbers that make 60.

Sometimes it’s useful to have a page that tests how quickly children can respond to a set of questions – and next week we have a Year 4 maths worksheet which looks at addition and subtraction of whole tens. There are 30 questions and children who have a good grasp of adding single digits should be able to transfer their skills and answer these quite quickly.

Coming soon we have another in our series of rounding larger numbers to the nearest million. This page will look in particular at the world’s oceans and the numbers involved have already been rounded to the nearest 1 000 sq km.

We will also be publishing a snappy little worksheet to check that children can add on from 2-digit numbers to make 50. There are several different mental strategies that can be used, but the most efficient is usually to count on to the next whole ten and then count on in tens to 50.

Doubling 2-digit numbers can be quite easy or fairly tricky; it all depends on the numbers, so look out for a page on doubling next week.

With the new term looming why not get in some early maths practice?  Next week we look again at multiplying 2-digit multiples of 10 by a single digit. Dead easy if tables are known.

Many children in Year 6 have difficulty reading and writing large numbers, including millions. We will be publishing a great page which looks at the area in square kilometres of some of the largest countries in the world.

Younger children still need plenty of practice with adding and subtracting small numbers mentally. We will show a nifty way to give practice in subtracting a single digit from a teen in a slightly different way from the usual questions. Suitable for bright year 2 or year 3 children.

Next week we have a follow up maths worksheet to the earlier explanation on how to estimate on a number line up to 10 000.

Most of the work on number lines in year 6 involve using decimals so this is a good chance to make sure that large whole numbers are understood. All answers are approximate but a guess can be considered good if it is about 50 either side of the answer given. Most  suited to Year 6 (10/11 years old).

Our first ‘One to Nine’ puzzle proved to be very popular so we will be publishing another. Excellent quick activity for a wet break as the autumn term approaches.

We will also be publishing another in our calculator series, this time for the 8 times table. The grid has a selection of multiples of 8 up to 10 x 8. The idea is to play with a partner, choose a square and then enter a number on the calculator that you think will produce the number in the square when multiples by 8. if successful place a counter on the square. The aim is to try and get four in a row.

Remember that if the 8 times table is not known, multiplying by 8 can be achieved by doubling, doubling and doubling again.

This page will be found in our year 5 section under Knowing Number Facts.

Next week we deal with larger numbers and estimating on a number line. This is a much trickier exercise than it first appears. Firstly, children need to be confident with reading large numbers and counting in thousands. Secondly they need to be able to visualise marks on a scale.

By Year 3 children should be familiar with the names of 5 and 6 sided shapes: pentagons and hexagons. Usually these shapes are seen in a regular form and children do not always recognise them when they are irregular. Next week’s mini investigation will help with this. A geoboard is a great help. Schools already have these, but at home it is easy enough to make one – just 9 short nails evenly spaced in a block of wood and some elastic bands are all that is needed.

We will also be publishing the second in our Year 6  revision sheets for dividing decimals by 10 or 100, ‘in your head’. A good understanding of place value is needed for this as there is little to do apart from move the numbers to the right. One place to the right divides by 10. Two places to the right divides by 100.

It has been reported today that parents are willing to pay up to £8 670 more for a home in the catchment area of a school that they consider goodat maths and English, so that their children can be educated there. The figures come from the Nationwide Building Society, just before the latest set of Key Stage 2 results are published.

The Building Society states that buying a home near a school which has 10% better results in SATs in Maths and English added an extra 3.3% to house prices.

Catchment areas have been a major factor in parents choosing their new home for some years now and there have been several cases reported of parents lying on application forms and pretending to live within the catchment area as well as Poole local council spying on parents to see if they do actually live where they say. What a strange world we live in!

Key Stage 2 test results which will be released next week are expected to show that almost 40% of 11 year olds ‘failed’ to hit the national targets in reading, writing and maths. What can we read into results such as these? Actually, very little!
Firstly, teachers at over 4000 schools (about a quarter) boycotted the tests and the NUT claim that this protest makes the results ‘an irrelevance’.
The expected standard at 11 is Level 4, but this has always been an unrealistic target for many children for many reasons. Why the government thinks that national testing improves education standards I do not know. From my own experience of 40 years teaching, real levels of achievement have not changed a great deal as a result of testing. They do tend to improve as a result of inspired teaching.
Perhaps what is more important is how little the Government makes of the data they collect. When making statements about how to improve education they would rather push for the latest fad ideas than for the result of any real evidence based research. This week the Centre for Policy Studies concludes that poor achievement in reading is a result of poor discipline and the absence of ‘synthetic phonics’ as a spelling programme. Yet they have done hardly anything to test this. The trials carried out have been tiny with under 200 children taking part – yet they collect all this data from Key Stage 2 test results from every school in the country, every year and fail to relate it to teaching methods to see what really does work.