Category: Maths news

By year 6 children will be very familiar with the metric system, but next week we have a worksheet which should test their knowledge and ability to convert from a larger metric unit to a smaller one.

We also continue with our series of multiplication for Year 2 with some multiplication word problems taken from real life situations. All the questions can be answered if the 2x table is known. There are picture illustrations on this page to help.

We also have the second page on  placing negative numbers on a number line, probably best suited to year 4 children. This time the questions asks for an arrow to be drawn to the correct position on the number line for each of the numbers shown.

Two maths worksheets for year 2 coming up next week. One looks at a vital part of understanding the process of multiplication: that it can be done in any order. This is also true of addition, but not of subtraction or division.
Setting up a little shop and buying and selling things has always been a great part of early maths, but usually this activity is limited to adding up and giving change. It can be used equally well to reinforce multiplication skills, as our worksheet shows.
We will also be publishing the second of our percentages worksheets for Year 5. It is typical of the English that we manage to write per cent in two different ways. Unlike the Americans who use ‘percent’, we use two words ‘per cent’, apart from when we write ‘percentage’ when we put it altogether.

One of the best ways of explaining multiplication is to think of it as repeated addition. So, a multiplication such as 4 x 3 is the same as adding 4 three times (4 + 4 + 4) or 3 lots of 4. We have an excellent page on this coming up next week, thanks to urbrainy.com.

We also have the next worksheet in our series of dividing mentally. This page will look at dividing larger numbers by 100. All the numbers are multiples of 100 so there will be no decimals involved with the answers.

Ordering negative numbers can prove tricky but we have a great page on this next week, suitable for Year 5 children. Putting two numbers in order on a number line follows one simple rule; the number to the right is always the larger number of the two. So -3 is smaller than -1.

Whilst browsing my stats I can see that a lot of you are missing the links at the top of the page which go to the games and worksheets. The maths worksheets, in particular, are organised in a much better way from these links (by year and topic) than by going down the right hand side (Categories) where they are organised chronologically.

Hope this is of help.

Much has been made of percentages and even in High Schools students find them tricky. However, the basis is pretty straightforward and next week we have a percentage worksheet which looks at finding percentages of amounts of money or measurements. A key factor in being able to do this type of question is to be able to work out 10% of an amount mentally.

Quite closely related to finding 10% of numbers is the second in our series of dividing by 10 with decimals. The questions on the forthcoming page should all be completed mentally as all it involves is moving each digit one place to the right and ensuring that a decimal point is placed between the units and tenths.

We really are concentrating on year 5 next week as the third of our worksheets will be about converting metric units, suitable for the 9/10 year old.