Nothing as painful as a visit to the hospital, inverse operations are all about addition, subtraction, multiplication and division! There are some fundamentals that children need to understand and apply if they are going to be able to solve problems quickly. If these are not understood early then they will struggle later. These are: Subtraction is the inverse of addition. This means that if you know that 10 + 6 = 16 then you can work out that 16 - 6 = 10. If you are given the number sentence 36 - 8 = 28 then you can work out that 28 + 8 = 36 Division is the inverse of multiplication This means that if you know that 5 times 6 = 30 then you can work out 30 divided by 6 is 5. If you are given the number sentence: 40 divided by 8 = 5 then you can work out that 5 times 8 = 40. These concepts keep coming back and are essential when it comes to working out long division, equations and a whole variety of maths at High School, so it is well worth spending time on them at an early stage. This page looks at completing simple number sentences from the information already given. Go to our Inverse operations pages