Key Stage Maths

The next time you go to the supermarket with your child try this very simple game. It will help secure numeracy as well as develop an understanding for the price of food!

At the supermarket look at the price of every item you put in your basket or trolley and ask your child to add up all the items in their head. It’s fine for the addition to be a estimate, then compare their estimation with the actual final price when you check out.

For example if you’re buying 3 items for £1.99 each and two items for £3.45 each the estimate for those items can be 3×2 + 2×3.5 = 6 + 7 = £13.

Apart from estimating it’s also a very useful game and exercise in retention. It is surprisingly difficult to remember a rolling total over a twenty five minute shopping trip!

It doesn’t matter which sport you pick, but pick one and use it to help secure numeracy with your child.

Baseball and cricket are both excellent sports to help teach a whole range of baths including pitches, runs, hits, errors, overs, run-rate, probability etc.

Golf is great because the winner is the person with the lowest score which is usually a negative number.

Although football scores are low, there are huge amounts of stats online which are great to share with your child to understand which team is likely to win the next match and what it means to their position in the table if they win, draw or lose.

Athletics is mostly about time which is also a really great way to help a child understand times, decimal places, averages and personal bests.

It cannot be over-stated as to how important understanding maths is in the real world.

Stock markets, currency exchange rates and of course the sports pages. These are all excellent sources of real-world maths which you can use to help educate your child how to use even simple arithmetic.

If you’re planning a holiday and your child is taking some pocket money to spend, there’s a good chance it is worth a bit more or a bit less IN REAL TERMS than it did a month ago.

Why do petrol prices go up and down and how does that relate to oil prices?

How much of the prices we pay for things are made up of tax v.s the underlying price of the product.

What is profit and what does it mean?

Encourage your child to read the financial and business pages of a newspaper and ask you questions.

Here’s a sample page from the Key Stage Maths Year 6 workbook for Number and Place Value. Page 10 focuses on negative numbers.

A lot of children struggle with negative numbers even after it has been explained on the number-line.

One of the best ways to secure negative numbers is using practical examples such as temperature which is what we have done in this workbook.

The next step after understanding the concept of negative numbers is to use them in calculations starting with greater than and less than, and then in addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

Click here for more info on the Key Stage Maths Y6 Number and Place Value workbook which you can download & print immediately after purchase.

Here’s an example from the Year 6 Key Stage Maths workbook “Number and Place Value”.

This is the very first page which sets the scene by making sure children can understand large numbers in digits and words.

The kind of numbers which often trip up children who are still in the process of securing number and place value are numbers like “Nine thousand and six”. Sometimes children struggle to make sure they write this as 9006 and not misplacing the six.

Click here for more info about this workbook

This is a great quote because it is completely true.

Whether a child is ploughing through the syllabus, doing homework or using workbooks, it’s the doing that is the learning.

One could say the same about art.

Our new Year 6 Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication & Division workbook is now available to buy, download and print.

It is A4, 21 pages with 164 Q&A, for only £4.95.

It is ink-friendly and has been designed to use minimal ink on each page.

Click here for more info

For children progressing to grammar or independent schools, Year 5 in Primary School is the most important year of their life at Primary School.

In the first week of Year 6 there are the 11+ exams and after just one term in Year 5 children will be sitting their entrance exams to independent schools.

By the start of the summer holiday after Year 5 it can be too late to “cram” over the summer holiday even if you are considering a tutor summer school or one-to-one tutoring.

So, make the most of Year 5, using Year 5 workbooks for subjects where a child is still struggling, and use Year 6 workbooks and exam papers for subjects where a child is confident.

If you need only one takeaway from this message, it is that Year 5 is crucially important, so practice, practice, practice.