Maths Blog

Next week we deal with larger numbers and estimating on a number line. This is a much trickier exercise than it first appears. Firstly, children need to be confident with reading large numbers and counting in thousands. Secondly they need to be able to visualise marks on a scale.

By Year 3 children should be familiar with the names of 5 and 6 sided shapes: pentagons and hexagons. Usually these shapes are seen in a regular form and children do not always recognise them when they are irregular. Next week’s mini investigation will help with this. A geoboard is a great help. Schools already have these, but at home it is easy enough to make one – just 9 short nails evenly spaced in a block of wood and some elastic bands are all that is needed.

We will also be publishing the second in our Year 6  revision sheets for dividing decimals by 10 or 100, ‘in your head’. A good understanding of place value is needed for this as there is little to do apart from move the numbers to the right. One place to the right divides by 10. Two places to the right divides by 100.

It has been reported today that parents are willing to pay up to £8 670 more for a home in the catchment area of a school that they consider goodat maths and English, so that their children can be educated there. The figures come from the Nationwide Building Society, just before the latest set of Key Stage 2 results are published.

The Building Society states that buying a home near a school which has 10% better results in SATs in Maths and English added an extra 3.3% to house prices.

Catchment areas have been a major factor in parents choosing their new home for some years now and there have been several cases reported of parents lying on application forms and pretending to live within the catchment area as well as Poole local council spying on parents to see if they do actually live where they say. What a strange world we live in!

Key Stage 2 test results which will be released next week are expected to show that almost 40% of 11 year olds ‘failed’ to hit the national targets in reading, writing and maths. What can we read into results such as these? Actually, very little!
Firstly, teachers at over 4000 schools (about a quarter) boycotted the tests and the NUT claim that this protest makes the results ‘an irrelevance’.
The expected standard at 11 is Level 4, but this has always been an unrealistic target for many children for many reasons. Why the government thinks that national testing improves education standards I do not know. From my own experience of 40 years teaching, real levels of achievement have not changed a great deal as a result of testing. They do tend to improve as a result of inspired teaching.
Perhaps what is more important is how little the Government makes of the data they collect. When making statements about how to improve education they would rather push for the latest fad ideas than for the result of any real evidence based research. This week the Centre for Policy Studies concludes that poor achievement in reading is a result of poor discipline and the absence of ‘synthetic phonics’ as a spelling programme. Yet they have done hardly anything to test this. The trials carried out have been tiny with under 200 children taking part – yet they collect all this data from Key Stage 2 test results from every school in the country, every year and fail to relate it to teaching methods to see what really does work.

Whilst the Primary Framework for Mathematics has little to say about addition of whole numbers in Year 6 it is still worth revising skills and developing fast technique, especially with mental arithmetic.

Next week we have a consolidation page of adding three 2-digit numbers, using all the techniques developed so far. This is a follow up page to that published last week.

Whilst children get used to counting on in tens and hundreds, sometimes it can be useful to count on in 25s and 50s, especially when using money or measurement. We will be publishing the second page on counting in 25s and 50s, concentrating on money and is probably most suited to year 4 children.

There will also be something for Year 5. This is the next in our series of calculator activities and is certainly one of the hardest. It looks at multiples of 7, including numbers above 10 and will test children’s knowledge of the 7 times table to the full.