Helping your child in Year 3 or Year 4 (Classes 1 to 6 – ages 7 to 9)

In these years your child is likely to learn to:

• understand and use numbers to 1000
• know all the addition and subtraction facts to 20 e.g. 5+7 = 12 or 18-3 = 15
• work out sums such as 43+28 and 64-21 and later 64-38 in their head
• extend mental methods to work out sums like 145+283 and 365-192 on paper
• know the 2, 5 and 10 times tables, and later tables 3 and 4
• multiply by 10 and 100
• multiply and divide numbers up to 100 by 2,3,4,5,10 and understand remainders
• begin to understand and use simple fractions such as
• begin to understand decimals through their use in money and measurement, e.g. £3.47 or 5.19m
• tell the time to the nearest minute
• recognise and use properties of shapes such as symmetry, right angle, lengths
• use and interpret simple graphs

The really important things in these years are:

For children to use the facts they know to work out new answers. For example:

There are many ways to work out 43+28 in your head. One way is to add 40+20 to get 60, then add on the 3 and 8. Another is to add 20 to 43 to get 63, move on to 7 to 70 and a final 1 to get the answer 71.

Similarly, a child might do 64-38 by counting on from 38

To work out 5x13, say “I know 5x10 is 50 and 5x3 is 15, so the answer is 65.”