2011 | Maths Blog

The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle

It teaches about counting, ordering, time and days of the week as well as a little science! Each page is a new day and each day the caterpillar eats one more piece of food

The Very Hungry Caterpillar (Picture Puffin)
This is the book which has inspired many young children. An absolute must for children from one upwards, although I am pretty sure that you will have come across it before.Put simply, a story about how a little egg, on a leaf in the moonlight becomes a hungry caterpillar who eats and eats and eats until finally turning into a beautiful butterfly.

Make sure that you get the large size book as the holes in the pages which the caterpillar has eaten through are great for young children to explore.
It teaches about counting, ordering, time and days of the week as well as a little science! Each page is a new day and each day the caterpillar eats one more piece of food.
The BBC has written news stories about this book including that it has been said that one copy a minute has been sold since it was released in 1969.

Mental arithmetic: dividing by 100

It’s January, and the beginning of a new year, but the sharp brains may have been dulled a little over the last week, so why not satart the new year with a little mental arithmetic? Here we our highlighting the next worksheet in our series of dividing mentally. This page looks at dividing larger numbers by 100. All the numbers are multiples of 100 so there will be no decimals involved with the answers. As has been said before, but the idea has to be repeated many times for children to fully understand; to divide by 10, move each digit one place to the right. To divide by 100 move each digit two places to the right.

So 1200 divided by 10 is 12.00. There is nothing wrong with leaving the two zeros after the decimal point, but we usually don’t worry with the decimal point or zeros if the answer is a whole number. Whatever you do, don’t tell your children to take away the noughts!!

This, and many other division worksheets, can be found in our Four Rules section as well as in the year group sections under calculating.

Divide by 100 (pg1)

Four rules: Subtract from multiples of 10

Mental arithmetic is the core of successful number work and much can be done without resorting to written methods. Subtracting a 2 digit number from a multiple of 10 can be done ‘in your head’, but it does need care and using an efficient method.

Let’s look at:

50 – 27

Probably the easiest way to do this is by ‘counting on’.

Step 1: Count on from 27 to the next whole ten (30), which is 3. Hold the three in your head for later.

Step 2: Count on in tens from 30 to 50, which is 20.

Step 3: Add the 20 to the 3 which is 23.

50 – 27 = 23.

(You will often find that children give the answer as 33 rather than 23. That is usually because they have counted on from 20 to 50 which is 30 and then added another 3 to get 33, ignoring the adjustment of the tens.)

Free maths worksheets below:

Subtract from multiples of 10 (p1 and p2)