Mental Methods - The Complete Series (5 lessons)

With lesson plans, detailed slides, differentiated activities to cater for every learner and a variety of printable resources, these Year 6 ‘Mental Maths’ lessons are a definite must-have.

The first lesson in this series encourages your children to think about strategies they are already familiar with to solve a variety of calculations mentally. The slides recap some of these strategies for your class to practise altogether before their independent learning activities provide some fun opportunities to practise these skills for themselves.

This lesson introduces your class to brackets, teaching them that calculations within brackets must always be solved before any other part of the calculation. Focussing on simple calculations with brackets, your class will get the chance to reinforce the mental maths strategies they practised during the previous lesson as they solve a variety of problems through some fun activities, including a game of Top Trumps!

Now that your class understand the function of brackets within a calculation, they will explore what happens when a calculation has multiple operations that need solving. The slides go through how to solve brackets first, then multiplication and division, and finally addition and subtraction. With plenty of opportunities to practise during the teaching input, they can then tackle some increasingly tricky calculations independently.

By now, your class should have a basic understanding of the correct order of operations. This lesson extends their understanding by looking at what happens when you have all four operations within the same calculation. They will think about why the correct order of operations is important before solving a variety of calculations (mentally wherever possible) that include both multiplication and division, as well as brackets, addition and subtraction.

After doing some times tables problem-solving, the slides for this lesson go on to help your class explore what happens when you multiply numbers up to 12 with a multiple of ten, a hundred or a thousand, such as 600 x 70. Using their knowledge of basic multiplication facts, your class will soon be able to solve problems involving larger numbers at the drop of a hat!