Year 5 Mental SubtractionThere are many ways that children can improve their mental arithmetic skills and in Year 5 one of those ways is to subtract by counting back, especially when it requires crossing a thousands boundary. For example, 4230 take away 400 can be done by counting back 100 to 4130, then another 100 to 4030, next is the tricky bit; take another 100 to make 3930 and finally subtract 100 to make 3830.In time children can adapt this to subtracting 4 hundreds from 42 hundreds, whilst keeping the tens and ones constant.Similar techniques can be used to subtract multiples of one thousand and ten thousand. We have just published sets of new pages on each of these.Go to Year 5 Subtraction