Category: Maths news

It’s up, up and away with some quite tricky subjects coming up next week, including division, decimals and fractions. One of the hardest ideas to get over to children is equivalent fractions, but it is one of the most vital. We have a year 4 worksheet which looks at some of the easier equivalence, using sixths, eighths and tenths and relating them to halves. It is a good idea to have as much practical work as possible, either shading in or cutting into pieces.

Solving division problems ‘in your head’ can often prove to be tricky and a good knowledge of tables and multiplication facts is needed, but it is surprsing how many different strategies we use when working mentally.

We also have the second in our series on rounding decimals for year 6; this worksheet will look at rounding to the nearest whole number and to the nearest tenth.

It’s all about time next week and, of course, times tables’.

Remembering how many days there are in any particular month is a challenge for many adults, yet alone children. There is of course the rhyme, ’30 days hath September’ etc, which is included in full on the worksheet but I prefer the ‘knuckle version’ where you can use the knuckles and dips on your hands to work out the number of days. Find out more on Monday!

We also have a time worksheet on reading the time to the nearest half hour or quarter hour, suitable for those just getting to grips with reading the time and clock faces.

Also a tables worksheet where the second set of questions looks at square numbers, which, of course, give a diagonal pattern on a tables square.

Well, the sun is shining and its looking good for the weekend! Next week we have a sunny mixture of maths worksheets on both mental and written methods of calculating. We have our second page on written multiplication of money by a single digit, which will be found in our Four Rules section. There will also be  a page on dividing by 6 mentally, which, of course is the inverse of knowing tables. This is a great time to concentrate on learning tables off by heart, which, if known, make both of these worksheets much easier to do.

There will also be a page for year 2 children on knowing pairs of numbers that make 20. Once pairs that make 10 are known this is a fairly straightforward step.

Next week we have two great pages on using standard, or efficient, methods of adding and multiplying money.

With both the addition and multiplication worksheets the crucial thing to remember is to keep the decimal points in a straight column when writing them out. It is also important to write down any zeros that occur in the answer – don’t just leave that column blank.

I always encourage children to write a decimal point in the answer before they start the calculation as, if it is missed out, the answer will be incorrect however well it has been added up.

It is often a good idea for children to check the answers to these types of page by using a calculator.

Graphs are often perceived as a quite easy part of maths, but many children find interpreting them correctly quite tricky. Our car pictogram uses a picture of a car to represent 5 cars. Again this page should be seen more as a starter to go and collect data themselves and make their own pictograms.  Problems might arise when the data is not in whole fives or tens. This can be solved by showing part of a car eg a wheel could represent one car. This would need to be shown clearly on the pictogram.

Next week we have a worksheet for those just beginning to subtract mentally as well as a page on the standard written method of subtraction for older children.

The Year 1 maths worksheet can be used as a check to see how well your child has learned their subtraction facts. There are several ways that this page could be tackled, depending on the confidence and knowledge of the child as it uses the subtraction sign with small numbers. Some children may want to use the number line to count back, others might prefer to use their fingers.

However, before this we will be posting a worksheet on subtraction where there are zeros to take from! One of the hardest ideas to get across to children is when they are carrying out a subtraction which requires adjusting across two columns. This only happens when there is a zero involved.

We also have another in our series of data handling worksheets for year 4, again interpreting pictograms. Each bird on the pictogram represents 5 birds. This page is a starter to show children how to complete and interpret a pictogram so that they can go on to create their own.