June, 2010 | Maths Blog

Coming soon: measuring, decimals and multiples

Children are used to reading scales where the divisions go up in ones, but they find it much harder when either they go up in larger numbers or when not all the divisions are numbered. Next week we are publishing a measuring worksheet which does both of these. The ruler shown is a scale drawing and each division is 10 cm, but only the 100 cm division lines are named.

Multiples of ten are fairly easy to work out, but nevertheless practice makes perfect and coming up soon is a great game of strategy to play to help reinforce multiples of 10.

We will also be sending up a straightforward mental arithmetic page on adding decimals for Year 6. The process is very much the same as adding two 2-digit whole numbers. When adding in our heads we usually start with the largest numbers, which, of course, is the opposite of the way we do it on paper. This needs pointing out to children as many, even in Year 6, lack the strategies necessary for mental addition.

Year 6 investigation: World Cup Final

With the World Cup Final rapidly approaching and SATs out of the way, what better way to spend a maths lesson than looking at the possibility of England meeting Brazil in the final?

With a predicted score of 5 all, after extra time, the task is to try and work out how many possible different scores there could have been during the game.

Of course there are lots of possibilities but to start with the score must have been 0 – 0. Then England could have scored to make it 1 – 0 or Brazil could have scored to make it 0 – 1.

As it is such a big task it would be a good idea to break it down into smaller tasks eg firstly work out all the possible scores up to a score of 1 – 1. Then work out all the possible scores up to 2 – 2. and so on. Done in this way there are plenty of opportunities to spot patterns, including square numbers.

Extension could go to even higher scores!

World cup final investigation

Resource of the Week: Written addition of money

Once children are familiar with the standard method of addition for 3 digits they can be introduced to addition of decimals. One of the best ways to do this is by adding money. On this page the first eight questions have been written out in the correct way, but the next seven will also need to be written out using the same method. The key here is to keep the decimal point in line as the numbers in later addition of decimals may not necessarily all have two digits after the decimal point. Also, don’t forget the £ sign in the answer.

This page and other similar pages can be found in our Four Rules Maths Worksheets.

Standard money addition (pg 1)

Year 3 maths worksheet: Counting in tens

By year 3 most children are quite confident with counting up in tens, but there can still be some difficulties, especially when counting over a hundreds boundary. This page looks specifically at this, with a set of number tracks which need completing. All of them cross the hundreds boundary and involve both counting on and counting back.

Counting in tens crossing the hundreds boundary (2)