What's the Total? - The Complete Series (5 lessons)

Through a variety of engaging activities, investigations and puzzles, these Year 5 ‘What’s the Total?’ lessons (including everything you need to teach a whole week of Maths planning) are the perfect way to improve their understanding of addition.

Get them using their number and addition knowledge to solve some addition problems mentally in this first lesson. Your class will be challenged to work their way through an addition maze to reach a given total from a start number, using rounding and estimation along the way to help them. Alternatively, they can find three numbers which total a given target number. There’s also an addition bingo game to wrap the lesson up with!

After some missing number chain warm-up activities, your class will have the chance to recap how the decomposition and expanded methods of addition work. They will use these methods to add several numbers together at once, consolidating their understanding of how to partition numbers into hundreds, tens and ones to make them easier to add together.

This lesson starts by encouraging your class to recognise the similarities and differences between the expanded and formal column addition methods. They will then recap in detail how column addition works before using this method to add several numbers together. Their independent learning activities have some challenging investigations to tackle to help reinforce these skills.

After recalling how the column addition method works, this lesson will help them to really understand the different steps of this method as they solve a variety of increasingly challenging missing number calculations. They will have to think carefully about the information they have been given and how they can use this, and follow the steps for column addition, to solve each problem.

The final lesson in this series gives your class the chance to use their improved addition skills to solve problems relating to distances between UK cities. The slides for the teaching input ask your class to help a delivery man (well, panda!) work out how far he has travelled on various trips. Their independent learning then asks them to order a variety of journeys from shortest to longest, using column addition to work out the answers.