Maths news | Maths Blog

Coming soon: Counting, addition and World Cup investigation

We have a great selection of worksheets coming up next week including an excellent World Cup Final investigation.

Firstly, a game for you to play with your child (around the age of 5/6) which urbrainy.com has allowed us to publish. You need two coloured pens to show who has answered the questions and a calculator in the case of any disputes!

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. We will be publishing a page which looks specifically at this.

It’s World Cup fever time and just to whet your appetite what if England reached the final and were drawing five all with Brazil at the end of extra time? How did the game go? Excellent for logical thinking and looking for patterns, especially as square numbers pop up!!

Suitable for Year 6 or younger football fanatics!

Resource of the Week: Add 9 mentally

Being successful with mental arithmetic is all about having a ‘feel for numbers’ and being able to manipulate them to suit the way you like to calculate. Knowing a few basic ‘tricks’ helps enormously with this and gives children confidence.

Adding 9 might sound a little dull, but knowing that you can do it in your head by adding ten and subtracting one can make all sorts of other mental additions easy, as we will see later adding 19, 29, 39 etc all follow the same path as do adding 18, 28, 38 etc; these tasks which at first glance might seem tricky end up being easy.

This is suited to year 2/3 children who are confident with adding single digits and can count up to 100.

Add 9 to 2-digit numbers

Coming soon: Handling data

Next week is very much a Handling Data week for older children. We will have two quite tricky weather graphs for Year 5 and some pie chart work for Year 6.

The weather graphs will show the average maximum and minimum temperatures for each month of the year for different places. It is typical of many found on weather sites on the Internet, holiday brochures and newspapers. It is surprising how often children ‘mess up’ with graph work, especially when labelling axes and interpreting the scales correctly.

Pie charts are not my favourite way of displaying data as they can often be misrepresented in the press. It is important to realise that they are only useful when comparing a slice to the whole pie, not comparing slices to different pies.

Resource of the week: Subtraction crossing thousands

Today we revisit a page that shows maths can be much easier than it at first appears. There are many occasions when a 4-digit subtraction can be done ‘in your head’. These questions, suitable for Year 5, are examples of this. They all involve numbers which are just over and just under a whole thousand.

For example: 3003 – 2994

Probably the easiest way to do this mentally is to count on 7 from 2993 to make 3000 and then count on, or add, the extra 4, making 11.

This is much easier than doing the question on paper, with lots of ‘borrowing’ and carrying, crossing out etc!

Count up crossing thousands

Resource of the week: adding 29, 39 etc

Once children are really secure and confident with adding 9 to a 2-digit number they can quickly catch on to how to add 19, 29 etc. Once again the process is the same: add the nearest whole ten and then subtract 1. Once this has been mastered similar techniques can be used to add 2-digit numbers that have 8 in the units, subtracting two rather than one, which makes adding any 2-digit numbers fairly straightforward!

This page, and many others, can be found in our Year 4 maths worksheets under Knowing Number Facts.

Add 29, 39, 49 to any 2-digit numbers

Coming soon: rounding, counting investigation and word problems

Next week we will have another page suitable for Year 5 children on rounding.When rounding to the nearest thousand the key digit is the hundreds digit. If it is 5 or more round up to the next whole thousand. If it is less than 5 then take away the hundreds tens and units and leave the number ’rounded down’.

We will also have a nice year 1 mini investigation using coins for children who are just becoming familiar with coins and counting. A yoyo costs 8p, but how many different ways are there of paying using 1p, 2p and 5p coins. It is a good idea to have a selection of these coins handy so that they can count out and record the different combinations. A separate page is available for recording either by drawing or writing the amounts down. An important aspect of this type of work is to check that the same result has not been recorded twice.

Even in Year 6 children often find word problems very tricky, partly because they are unsure of what calculations to carry out to reach the solution. This page has a small number of word problems, but it asks for the working out to be shown and what calculation needs doing eg addition.

The first two questions require only a single step to reach the answer, but the second two need two steps, which makes them much harder.

Resource of the Week: Counting on in threes

Number squares can be a great way to show some of the fantastic and fascinating patterns that numbers can make. We are used to the 10 by 10 number square but, of course, they can be any size and the different sizes can create different patterns when counting on. For example, the first number square on this maths worksheet is a 6 by 6 square. When the multiples of 3 are coloured we get two vertical lines of colour. However, when using a 7 by 7 square, the pattern changes. Why is this?

This type of exercise can be used many times and soon children should be able to predict the kind of pattern that will be made, as well as having some practice with learning their tables!

Counting on in 3s patterns

Coming soon: Shape, tables and square numbers

How well are tables known? Here is a quick sheet to see how well the 3x, 4x, 6x, 8x and 10 times tables are known. Probably the two hardest of these are the 6 times and 8 times tables.

I have a nice little shape investigation, suitable for year 2. Circles, triangles, rectangles and hexagons can be bought in the shape shop. They are priced according to the number of sides. Circles cost 1p hexagons 6p etc.

What shapes can be bought for 20p?

A good challenge which uses knowledge of shape, counting money and logical thinking.

By Year 6 children are expected to know the square of numbers up to at least 10. next week we have two pages which provide some revision of this together with some extension work on finding square numbers of multiples of 10. Suitable for the Year 6 Planning for Block B Unit 3 Week 2.

Resource of the Week: Time to the quarter hour.

This maths worksheet on reading time to the nearest quarter of an hour highlights several issues which create problems for children.

Firstly, on the clock face the hours are clearly numbered but the minutes are not and children need to be able to count on in fives before they can read minutes successfully.

Secondly, when telling someone the time we often approximate, either to the nearest quarter of an hour or the nearest five minutes, even when we can see clearly what the time is to the nearest minute.

Thirdly, when saying the time out or writing it we use several different conventions, as shown on the answer sheet.

Lastly, many children seldom come across this type of clock face, especially if they use digital watches, mobile phones etc., therefore take much longer to work it out – don’t be surprised to find ten year olds unable to read an analogue clock correctly.

About what time?

Coming soon: Money, prime factors and multiples of 4

Thanks to urbrainy.com for next week’s money worksheet, suitable for year 1 children. It’s always a good idea to set up a little shop at home and take turns buying and selling items. There is an amazing amount of maths involved in this, from learning how to write numbers to counting on and back and finding two or three lots of a number. If a shop is not available why not try this page?

For those who enjoyed the Year 3 calculation game on the 4x table there is a follow up with harder multiples of 4 which really test knowledge of the 4x table.

We will also have a maths worksheet for year 6 on how to find prime factors. Before attempting this page it is necessary for children to have a good understanding of factors and prime numbers.