Parents / carers often say they’re less confident about supporting their child with Maths. The first rule is: don’t suggest that Maths is less important than Reading or Writing! Mental calculations, estimating, measuring and telling the time are important skills we all use every day. Beware of saying in front of your child that you weren’t good at Maths at school – children might perceive this as you saying it’s OK to have these low expectations.
Have a look, too, at our Mental Calculation Strategies guide which outlines useful techniques that people use to calculate in their head. Please support your child by talking through different methods, being aware that there are often various ways to work something out (and rarely one right way). Remember, this guide is all about mental calculations – it’s quite hard to explain the strategies on paper – please ask if you’re unsure.
Does your child have to work out what 8 + 2 is, or do they ‘just know it’? There are some simple calculations where people shouldn’t need to work out at all – they should just have secure, confident recall of the facts. Our Addition Facts guide provides a guide to what addition facts we expect pupils in Year 1 and Year 2 to know (the table might look confusing – please ask us if you’re unsure).
Also, check out the Family Maths Toolkit which has some really helpful guidance and ideas. However you support your child’s mathematical skills, remember if you’re not sure, please ask a teacher in school.
Times tables
The quick recall of multiplication and division facts (times tables) is really important for all children. The ability to recall these facts quickly (rather than taking too long working them out) helps children to answer questions in lots of areas of Maths much more easily. Based on the National Curriculum, the expectation of times tables is:
- Year 2: 2x, 5x, 10x
- Year 3: 3x, 4x, 8x
- Year 4: 6x, 7x, 9x, 11x, 12x
- Year 5: all x and ÷ facts (12×12)
- Year 6: all x and ÷ facts (12×12) and related language/symbols (eg % and square root)
Remember: the expectation is for children to recall the division facts, too.
You can help your child at home using the series of spreadsheets below. To practise these at home:
- download the file (the year group label is a guide only) and it will open in an Excel spreadsheet
- press F9 for a new test (you can generate an unlimited number of different tests – just keep pressing F9 to generate a new test!)
Don’t test too early! We’ve created these tests to help you at home to check your child’s times tables knowledge – they won’t be especially helpful in helping your child to learn them. There are many ways in which children can learn times tables – for example, playing games, quick-fire questions from an adult, chanting tables, writing the tables out and using songs, websites or apps. This learning needs to take place before the knowledge gained can be assessed in a test.
