At Moortown Primary, we place great emphasis on calculating skills, both mental and formal written calculations.
Our Mental Calculations guide is a summary of some of the most useful mental calculation strategies. 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 these are mental calculations, so they’re quite hard to explain on paper – please ask if you’re unsure.
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.