Maths

Maths

The Maths section requires your child to feel confident in the following areas:

Mental Maths

Mental maths is a powerful tool for getting through maths problems quickly and effectively. It’s worth spending time helping your child with their mental maths. There are tricks your child can use for other problems to make them easier.

The Power of 100: Adding or subtracting 100 to a number Is quite straightforward. We can use this fact to make it easier to work with numbers that are close to 100. For example adding 98 can be carried out as adding 100 and then subtracting 2. For example 587 plus 98 is equal to 587 + 100 (687) - 2 = 685. You can use the same method with subtraction—subtracting 97 is the same as subtracting 100 and adding 3.

Working in pairs: Mental maths can help your child solve problems that at first glance look very difficult. For example a four digit number can be split into two pairs. 3561+2932 can be solved by adding 35 +29 and 61+32 to give 64 and 93. Thus the answer is 6493.

Know your tables: The single most useful thing to do to help your child improve their maths skills is to make sure they know their times tables off by heart up to 12 x 12. They should be able to recite every pair without any pause. This will then help with more complicated problems such as: 17 x 8 = (10 x 8) + (7 x 8) = 80 + 56 = 136