This term we will be participating in ‘CLIC’ maths sessions 2- 3 times a week.

These interactive mental math sessions are broken down into four sections.  You might find the information below useful to help you understand what the children will be doing.

C – Counting:  counting forwards and backwards to 100 (and beyond for some), counting in 10s and 5s, reading 2 and 3 digit numbers.

L – Learn-its.  These will be sent home weekly for homework.  ‘Learn-its’ are simple, mental sums that the children will learn by heart.  They have been taught that learn-its should be answered immediately without using their fingers.   The children will be given learn-its for homework and should be orally practised most days  Please see the homework uploads on the blog weekly to see which learn-its we are focusing on.  You may wish to try:

• Asking them their learn-its and getting them to respond quickly
• Asking them nonsense sums using their learn-its e.g. 1 monkey + 1 monkey, 3 bananas + 3 bananas.  This allows the children to recognise that numbers have meaning.
• Putting on a timer for 20 seconds and getting them to orally answer as many ‘learn-its’ as they can in this time.  Try beating this time over the next few weeks.
• Asking them their sums orally whilst missing parts of their learn-its out e.g 3 add ‘what’ makes 6?
• Give them extension sums (orally) e.g. since  we know that 1+1 =2 what would 1 hundred and 1 hundred be, 1million and 1 million etc?  Please note this should only be done orally.

I – It’s nothing knew.  This section involves us applying what we can already do with small numbers to much bigger numbers or to different contexts.  

C – Calculations.  Every day we will spend five minutes developing our mental skills in solving addition and subtraction calculations.