To use and apply Maths skills and knowledge in word problems and puzzles.

[mankyscotslass]

DS1 is 10 and will start YR6 in September.

His end of year report said that he had a good grasp of Maths - he was marked as a 5C, but needed to work on word problems, and asked if we could try some over the holidays. But there were no suggestions on where to start looking for them.

Any YR6 teachers out there who can point me in the right direction? Once I know where to start I will be off and running with it!

Go to woodlands junior school and word problems and choose yr 6.

Oh that is great, exactly what I needed, thank you.

There are a number of sources of these.

Kumon do a number of workbooks that have relatively simple word problems in. They are graded. If he is 5c then you probably want the grade 3/ grade 4 one depending on how good his basic arithmetic is.

emaths.co.uk has a large supply of past papers for the KS2 sats; you can work on these as nearly all maths sats qs are word problems. You can also download answer sheets/markschemes.

Bond publish a number of maths workbooks based on the 11+ but which have a lot of word problems (mixed in with basic calculations). Waterstones or Amazon stock them. My level 4s work through the age 9-10 one so you would probably want the age 10-11 one.

Nrich (google) it have a lot of maths problems/word problems but their rating scheme for how difficult they are is a bit variable; in theory you could look for problems that are at KS2 one or two star challenge level but some problems are a lot harder than others.

Thank you for that too.

mankyscots,
Imo, the best word problems are those available from Singapore Maths. What you need is the Singapore Mathematics Programs - Primary Mathematics 3rd Edition. It's difficult to get hold of these days but you can still get copies from Ichthus Resources. Go to Ichthus. Click on their online catalogue. Scroll down to Maths and go to Singapore Maths Programs. Click on that and go to Primary and you'll find Primary Mathematics 3rd Edition. There are six levels.
The reason why Singapore Maths is at the top of the world maths rankings is precisely because they do it so thoroughly and combine conceptual understanding with procedural knowledge.

nrich

How about you just ask her to solve problems all the time? How many days to her birthday? What % of the way through the year is her birthday? If the recipe needs 175g for one portion serving four people, but you have five people to cook for, then how many grams are needed? etc., etc

soundswrite
I don't want to hijack this thread but I need to ask you about Singapore maths programme can I Pm you ?

goingto...
Yes, of course.

anice, Putting questions like that are, as long as the questions aren't too difficult, very useful. However, there are two problems: the first is human in that it's difficult to keep thinking up questions and the setting of them tends to be as random as the questions - a bit like Cato random attacks on to Inspector Clouseau; the second is that questions need to be graded from simple to more complex. For example, it may be relatively easy to calculate how many days to a birthday but asking for a percentage would probably be considerably harder.
Good word problems in maths programmes build in extra steps and show how to solve them in concrete ways. This is what Singapore Maths does particularly well.

thay re the kinds of questions I ask my DC all the time and you just get a feel for what they can do easily/ what's a small struggle/ what would ruin their self-confidence because its too hard. My DC actually enjoy this sort of thing but everyone is different.

However, there is definitely a place for formal study programs. We use IXL.

How about Primary resources loads and loads here (scroll down for the higher level stuff for year 6.)

BTW if he is 5c at the end of year 5 he is doing very well!

Thanks again everyone.

BrigitBigKnickers I will use that link it's great. He loves Maths-doesn't get that from me.

Numbers make sense to him. He loves Chess too, and his teacher has suggested we try to up his involvement in that, as it will help with his Maths too.