Times Tables Masters

Love them or hate them, the children need to know their times tables for maths this year. Here’s the plan.

Before the end of Year 5, I want to accredit every member of the class as a Times Tables Master.   To be a Times Tables Master, they’ll need to know every times table from 2 x 2 to 12 x 12 really, really well – so that they can answer questions quickly, without hesitation, in whatever form they’re put.  I’m going to be tough about this!

From now to the end of the year, each week in independent learning I want each member of the class to try to make progress towards Master status and to get me to test them on whichever Times Tables they’ve been practising .   When they’ve become a Times Tables Master they can relax and do something else!

Otis is the first official Times Tables Master in the class – congratulate him if you see him.  But he’s not quite on easy street.  There’s one extra nasty challenge to complete…

Division, chunking and all that

We had another quick look at division today – we’ll come back to it in a week or two.  But here’s Sasha and Dylan doing a great job of demonstrating a couple of approaches to solving 123 divided by 8.

Click here to see Sasha and Dylan demonstrate chunking and short division

Times tables duelling

Congratulations to Luca and Otis who have won through against all the other year 5 and 6 students to represent Freeman House in the whole school times tables competition, and to Lucy and Chloe who did superbly well and very nearly achieved the same for Radcliffe.

Maths challenge – 20 house points up for grabs

Last week we collected coins to support the Cancer Research UK charity.  Before we count up the donations, I have set the class the challenge of estimating the number and total value of the coins in the bucket – with 10 house points up for grabs for the person who gets closest in each case.   So far the estimates have been a bit too unscientific for my liking and I’d like to encourage the children to have a go at this at home with parents, grandparents or older siblings and post method and estimates as a reply to this post.  Deadline is midnight on Thursday!