Maths at Home
Parents have a great opportunity to develop their child’s maths skills at home by involving them in everyday activities. If your children can help you measure the ingredients when baking or work out which supermarket deal is cheapest, then it’s helping them understand maths in real life. It also helps them become exposed to key vocabulary and develop their basic maths and problem solving skills. Take a close look around your home or out on the street and you will quickly come to notice that numbers are everywhere! Being exposed to these real life situations demonstrates to children how maths and the need to use mathematical skills is all around us and helps them build a deeper understanding when being introduced to these topics at school.
Some examples of how parents can expose their children to maths in real life:
🔢 Number
Children can begin to make their first real-life connections to numbers as they count the number of seconds before they hunt for a friend in a game of hide and seek or when they calculate how much money they have to buy something from the local newsagent.
⏱️ Time
Children can begin to learn about time from their set bed time to the time they start school in the morning. Help your child read the time using a digital and analogue clock (including 24 hours). Calculate time intervals or read bus timetables. Use vocabulary such as o’clock, a.m./p.m., quarter past/to, half past, hours, minutes and seconds.
🍳 Cooking at home
Working through simple recipes such as baking a cake can utilise a number of mathematical skills. Children can weigh out ingredients to the appropriate amounts and look at the varying increments on a weighing scale. Doing so will expose children to unfamiliar vocabulary such as grams and kilograms.
💻 Homework & Portals
Learning which will be taking place in class is continued through the tasks set each week on MyMaths. Log in details for MyMaths will be in your child’s home school diary. If your child completes the tasks that have been set by their class teacher then they can continue completing more activities if they wish. All work completed is marked and automatically sent to the class teacher. Each child also has a login for Times Tables Rockstars which they can use to practice their times tables.
Rapid Recall Skills for Key Number Facts
Parents/carers can also support their children by helping them to develop rapid recall skills for key number facts so that they are able to ‘know’ the facts without having to work them out. Please use the number facts below to help your child become fluent with place value and calculations.
By the end of Year 2, children should be able to:
- Recall and use addition and subtraction facts to 20 fluently, and derive and use related facts up to 100.
- Recall and use multiplication and division facts for the 2, 5 and 10 multiplication tables, including recognising odd and even numbers.
Year 3
Add and subtract numbers mentally, including: a three-digit number and ones; a three-digit number and tens; a three-digit number and hundreds.
Recall and use multiplication and division facts for the 3, 4 and 8 multiplication tables.
Year 4
Count in multiples of 6, 7, 9, 25 and 1000.
Recall multiplication and division facts for multiplication tables up to 12 × 12.
Year 5
Multiply and divide numbers mentally drawing upon known facts.
Confident and recall rapidly multiplication and division facts for multiplication tables up to 12 x 12.
Year 6
Perform mental calculations, including with mixed operations and large numbers.
Perform mental calculations using rapid multiplication and division factors across large numerical sets.
