please be totally honest here

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DS is 8 and struggling with maths which has become much harder in his year 4 class. This is typical of one of the 'problems' he has for homework. Is this typical of yr 4 maths and do your kids 'get it' or have to be led through, step by step?

"We are going to have a bake sale. We will make 20 cakes and each cake will be cut into 12 slices. If we sell each piece fo 25 cents, how much money will we raise?"

All opinions welcome. TIA

A lot of children find written problems hard. it seems counter-intuitive to me, I would think that the sums written out like a story would be easier, but they aren't.

I'm pretty sure my year 4 ds could do this, though. He is, bu some miracle - asleep now, but I'll try him on it in the morning if you like and see what happens.

Have you tried making cakes out of plasticine and physically cutting them up? I found poker chips a huge help with my maths-averse dd!

Oh, and 11+ questions are much harder than this in our neck of the woods!

I don't understand the question.

You'll have to break it down for me

Is the question - is this typical for Y4 maths? It might be but from memory these were Y3 type questions. This is school-specific though and no indication.

I'm not allowed to do homework with my DCs - they won't let me - all I get to do is squint over their shoulders or sneak their books out when they aren't looking. So I think they probably got it without me.

this is the level of an NFER 11+ sample question, it is in fact easier than the question above
"A library has 100 bookcases. Each bookcase contains 312 books. How many books are there in total?"
other questions are more difficult, but type of question does come up

Your DS is 8 and is in Yr 4, mine is age 7 in Yr 2........which country are you in?

orienteerer
year 2 age 6 or 7
year 3 age 7 or8
year 4 age 8 or 9
so nothing odd about it being uk. Presumably he hasn't had his birthday yet this school year

Thanks - am in a rush now but will look carefully at this thread later today. We are in Holland, so Group 5 which is Year 4 which is I think is 4th grade!!! Very confusing!

No that's wrong, think its 3rd grade!

have chatted today with one of the maths teachers at school who had lots of advice including a good tip. Regarding these 'number story problems' she suggested replacing the larger numbers with smaller ones so ds concentrates more on the concept rather than the arithmetic. So, as practice, instead of working out eg 12 cakes each cut into 8 slices at 25 cents each, I should change the equation to lower numbers and practice the steps using those. Then once DS has the idea, replace the numbers with the original ones given in the homework. Its worth a try.

Thanks to everyone who posted

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Sorry, why all these dollars or cents..... have I just gone into a long sleep while we became the 51st state?

the OP is in Holland, they possibly use US teaching materials

Agree with the others. These questions do start to appear in Yr 4 but children certainly don't find them easy. My DD1 (now Yr 6 and good at maths) would have taken a bit of time to do and I suspect that my DD2 (Yr 2 and not so good) will struggle. So please don't get depressed about it.

Because I live in Holland and everything is Euros and cents . I am not trying to be Trans Atlantic!!

Great advice from lots of posters. Thank You

When my DD got questions like these and used to think they were too hard (without really bothering to look first ) then I used to get her to read through it and work out what the sum was and write it down, then actually do the calculations.

Once she got used to this the actual working it out wasn't so bad.

Sorry if this is a dumb question- are they allowed to use a calculator?

I taught primary for years. I think that this is the sort of problem that you'd expect them to do with help, working it through. With no support, I think that it would be tricky for the average year four. There are two things that are tricky, one sorting out the problem itself. Here, I would encourage your dd to draw pictures eg of one cake cut into twelve pieces, work out how many lots of 25 cents for each cake and the work out how much they'd make per cake. Try using quarters to help her visualise. The process they're getting at is multiplication, but I think it's important at the early stage of this process to let your daughter draw, use visual aids etc so that it's real and she understands, rather than just showing her how to do the multiplication sum, which could well be tricky to start with. If this has been set for homework, I'd imagine that they want you maybe to help her as one to one help going through a prob like this is difficult to achieve in class. By all means approcah the teacher to see why she's set the homework. It shouldn't be IMO introducing a new idea but reinforcing. For a teacher this seems a bit muddled as a response but I hope it helps.