Maths question in relation to levels/years?

[GlobalGill]

Which year or level would these questions likely be pitched to? Thanks:

Jane had some beads.
Jane lost 128 of her beads but her Mother gave her another 177 beads.
She had 492 in the end.
How many beads did Jane have at first?

David will be 53 years old in 21 years' time.
Sean is 13 years younger than David and Terence is 12 years younger than Sean. How old is Terence now?

Anywhere between end of y2 & middle of y6 in my experience! Me & DD ( yr6 now) thinks those are typical end yr4 questions.. so about 3b?

Hi Globalgill:

I agree with lljkk - that this seems to appear from Y2 (my DD1 is Y5 so can't say much about Y6 yet - but she has had these all the way through as has DD2 now Y3, since Y2).

What I will say is when these were introduced in Y2, both DDs struggled but this was definitely a case of teaching in preparation for the SATs. DD1 definitely didn't get it at all in Y2, DD2 kind of got it, but sometimes needed a bit of encouragement to think it through. However, they return to this type of question (multi-step problems) again and again, and progressively do get better at them.

HTH

The route to reasoning is very similar to questions DS has just been doing in an age 8-9 Bond book but the numbers in the first question would probably also have been 2 digit.