Already we are into week 2 of our Year 2 resources and a brand new set of Brainy Targets for the week. A little bit harder this week, now the rustiness of the summer holidays has past. This week our activities are designed to help with:

Reading and writing 2-digit numbers

Counting larger numbers by grouping into tens

Partitioning 2-digit numbers

Subtracting whole tens with a number line

Understanding that subtraction is the inverse of addition

Presenting solutions in an organised way by making 10 by adding 3 numbers.

For teachers this relates to the Primary Framework for Maths: Year 2, Block A, Unit 1, Week 2

Go to Year 2 Week 2 resources

On BBC later this month Dylan Williams bans hands up in the classroom apart from when asking a question. Instead he asked any of the children. Resistance occurred and the end result was that mini whiteboards were issued on which all pupils wrote their answer.

This is certainly not new – I was using them 10 years ago, and the Victorians used slates! It does raise the issue of participation in the classroom, with a great fear amongst many of giving the wrong answer and being made to look a fool. It also only really works for ‘closed’ questions which can only have one possible short answer. With the introduction of new technology such as ipads how long will it be before all answers are recorded and processed? Some children would love it and some would hate it

Read more from the BBC

Children also find these dates fun so why not ask when the next interesting pattern can be made from a date. Certainly the 10th October has promise, but so do several others. Can you find them?

Reading scales is something which we tend to take for granted, but they can be much trickier than they first appear. To begin with children will come across scales where every division is labelled, but most scales in real life do not do this. Litre jugs, minutes on a clock, rulers etc often have divisions which are not labelled.

These pages look at a scale drawing of a ruler where only the 10 cm divisions are labelled. One way of understanding this is to think of it as a number line. Start at the nearest marked unit and count forwards or backwards to reach the arrow. This page is most suited to Year 2 children (6/7 yrs old).

Go to our Reading scales worksheets

Working out the difference between clockwise and anticlockwise can be very tricky for young children -  they have enough problems working out left and right! Nevertheless these terms are introduced in Year 2. Probably the best way to approach this is to show the movement with the hands of a clock and then to practice making quarter turns clockwise and anticlockwise, holding out one arm to point in the direction faced. There are also a number of games that can be played such as blindfolding a person and asking them  to move a number of steps forward and then turning to reach a particular point. (You need to trust the person giving the instructions!)

Go to clockwise and anticlockwise

The lovely long summer holiday is quickly drawing to a close and teachers are beginning to plan for next term. Whether you are a teacher or a parent why not download the first week of our brand new set of resources for Year 2? Each week we will publish a set of printable pages to match the Maths Primary Framework Planning Blocks. Each set will contain anything from 18 to 25 pages of great maths to challenge your children and save you time hunting around for the right resources. As well as this we have 40 mental arithmetic questions to sharpen up those crucial skills!

Our first week is a gentle introduction to Year 2 maths with work on:

Find solutions by logical thinking to our ‘How many ways?’ balloon challenge

Revise counting on and back in ones

Revise counting on in tens

Order 2-digit numbers

Add three small numbers

For teachers this relates to the Primary Framework for Maths: Year 2, Block A, Unit 1, Week 1

Go to Year 2 Week 1  resources

Our Challenges are proving to be a great success as they allow children to explore mathematical concepts and extend their thinking. Here is a great little investigation for young children, which helps with counting and logical thinking. Using just the 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p and 20p coins what different totals can you have with just two coins?

At first it is suggested that you make a rule that says that you can’t have two of the same coin. This limits the scope of the challenge, but if children deal successfully with this there is no reason why they can’t investigate totals that include using the same coin twice, or even increasing the number of coins to 3.

Go to our 2 coin challenge

We have had several requests recently for more in the way of Data Handling for Year 2 and we are now beginning to build up our resources in this area. The aim of this set of pagers is to give opportunities to interpret data on a simple block diagram and to provide the impetus for the child to create their own survey and present the results, again in a block diagram.

The subject is favourite sandwich fillings – always a popular discussion topic with young children and the questions use a lot of mathematical language ( most popular, how many more etc).

Favourite sandwich fillings

New users to the site will be able to get a free trial with a number or print credits allowing them to sample the worksheets that they want.

Of course when we make these changes to the site, the site will have to be down for a short while. We think this will only be at most an hour, but as with all new things, there could be unforeseen problems but we will keep you updated here in the news section.

In year 2 children are introduced to most of the common metric units, including:

centimetres

metres

kilometres

grams

kilograms

litres.

In the real world they will still hear other units being used (those old inches, feet, pounds etc) but it is vital that they gain a secure knowledge of the metric system and are able to judge which units would be most appropriate to use to measure something.

These pages ask for things which could be measured using the above units. There are two aspects to this, firstly that children use the correct type of unit (metres to measure length etc) and secondly, that if there is a choice of unit to use the most appropriate ( a classroom in metres rather than kilometres).

Go to our ‘Which unit? worksheets