How can I support my child at home with Maths without having the same equipment that they use in school?

Research shows that children learn more when they can visualise numbers and use physical resources to help their understanding. At The Berkeley, physical resources are openly available to all age groups of children to use in their Maths lessons. The Maths resources we have in school can be recreated by using these simple, household objects.  

Here are 5 everyday household objects that can be turned into Maths resources!

1. Lego! 

If you have Lego/Duplo/Megablocks at home, these can be used instead of counting cubes. Lego is also fantastic for helping children to visualise fractions and even helps you with adding and subtracting fractions.

2. Spaghetti and pasta!

In school, we use Dienes which are small plastic pieces which represent numbers. Dienes can be used to represent thousands, hundreds, tens and ones. Food always attracts children’s attention! Why not try using lasagne sheets to represent 100s, spaghetti to represent tens and pasta shells to represent ones?

3. Homemade beadstrings

Beadstrings are great for helping you to count in 2s, 5s, 10s and in fact, any group size, representing 2 digit numbers, adding and subtracting. Beadstrings work well when you use 2 different colours of beads. For every 10 beads, change to the other colour. If you don’t have beads at home, you could try painting different colours of dried pasta tubes instead.

You can thread them onto elastic or a shoelace. For Nursery and Reception children, try a beadstring of 20 and for a beadstring for Year 1 upwards, try 100 beads.

See the website below for lots of ideas on how to use your beadstrings:

http://theelementarymathmaniac.blogspot.com/2013/09/how-to-make-100-bead-strings.html

4. Place value counters

In school, we use small counters to represent numbers. Bottle tops of different colours (written on with a permanent pen) can be used to represent ones, tens, hundreds, thousands and even tens of thousands.

5. Homemade Tens frames

Tens frames are simple grids that allow children to visualise numbers quickly when counters are laid out in an organised way. They are great for allowing children to add and subtract, make teen numbers and recall number bonds to 10 or 20.

Tens frames can be made with cardboard strips, lollipop sticks or even egg boxes with bottle tops, circles of cardboard or buttons as counters.

Free interactive resources:

If your child prefers to use online interactive Maths resources, a great FREE website is https://mathsbot.com/manipulativeMenu 

Mathsbot contains interactive coins, Dienes, hundred squares and number frames (that resemble Numicon) and many more.

This free online glossary from Oxford Owl may help to clearly explain any Mathematical language that you may come across:

 https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/at-school/education-glossary/maths-education-glossary-a-l/

Th National Numeracy website is full of information for parents with free, downloadable tasks (from Reception to Year 6) for you to try at home with your child. 

https://www.nationalnumeracy.org.uk/free-family-maths-toolkit

White Rose Planning and Teaching

We use the White Rose Maths scheme as the basis for our Maths curriculum.

To support parents with Maths at home, White Rose have produced lots of resources, which you can find on their website (Click here for White Rose Maths Parent resources) under "Parents & Pupils".

This section includes support on several areas of maths including videos under the 'Maths with Michael' section. Click here for 'Maths with Michael'. The videos also have free, downloadable easy to follow, step by step guides with copies of resources that we use in school. Please check them out!

Please find below links to guides from White Rose – these give an introduction to how we teach place value, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions and algebra. They have activities you can try with your child(ren) at home - please click on the PDFs links below. We hope you find them useful. 

If you would like some resources to support your child’s learning further, please click on the year group below to access the free booklets. There is one for years 1 – 6 for each Maths unit covered. 

If your child is in Reception or Key Stage 1, we would recommend ’1 Minute Maths’ from White Rose to practise their number fluency. You can download this for free on an app store. Click here for 1 Minute Maths

If your child is in Year 2 to 6, you should have a login for Times Tables Rocks Stars. Please ask your child’s teacher if you are unable to access these resources.

    Maths guidance document: Key Stages 1 and 2

   Mathematics guidance videos: Key Stages 1 and 2

Useful websites

       Times Table Rock Stars

   MyMaths

     Numbots

Resources that do not require logins: