Year 6 Order of Operations

By Year 6 children should be familiar with the idea of having rules to decide in what order mathematical operations are carried out.In its simplest form this can be described as BODMAS First do the operations that are in brackets.Then do any divisions.Thirdly do any multiplicationsLastly, do any additions and...

Year 2 Subtraction, Bar Modelling and Number Lines

An exciting development in teaching maths in the UK is bar modelling. Bar models are pictorial representations of number problems and act as a half-way house between using concrete representations (e.g. solid cubes) and working in the abstract. Bar models can be applied to subtraction and are an excellent way...

Year 6 Multiply and Divide Fractions

Multiplying fractions is in many ways the easiest of the operations when dealing with fractions. Put simply, there are three steps: multiply the top numbers (the numerators)multiply the bottom numbers (the denominators)simplify the fraction if necessaryWhilst this is quite easy, the reason why it works is more complex. Children are...

Year 3 Expanded Addition

Expanded addition is a method used to add numbers using the expanded form of the number. So, the question is, what is the expanded form of a number? The expanded form of a number is created when the number is written to show the place value of each digit. 76...

Ordinal Numbers in Year 2. Odd and Even.

Children in Year 2 will use ordinal numbers to describe the position of an object or which order things come in, such as first second and third. There are plenty of practical activities which can be done, from positioning a collection of toys in a row and asking children to...

Upper KS2 Spelling ‘ice’ or ‘ise’?

Should you write practice or practise? If you are American the answer is very simple as they only use the ‘ice’ version – practice. If you are from the UK then it all gets a little bit trickier.Practise should be used when it is a verb, or ‘doing’ word. For...