Seeing Doubles - Lesson 4: Written Doubling Methods

With lesson plans, slides, activity ideas, differentiated worksheets, games and more, there is something for that is sure to make every child start 'Seeing Doubles' more clearly!

The first lesson in this series gives your class plenty of opportunities to practise doubling numbers below 100. Starting with smaller numbers that they can work out mentally, your class will then be challenged to double as many numbers as they can through a variety of fun activities.

This lesson challenges your class to halve whole numbers below 100, including halving odd numbers, expressing the answer as decimals. The main activity will have them matching questions to their correct answers whilst the alternative activity has a fun board game to reinforce rapid recall of halving facts.

This lesson moves on to look at some more challenging doubles as your class learn how to use partitioning to double more challenging numbers. They will be encouraged to work out as many doubles as they can mentally before using partitioning jottings to help them solve those that require a bit more thinking!

Now that your class are dab-hands at doubling two-digit numbers, they will move on to double three- and even four-digit numbers! The slides go through a step-by-step process of using a vertical addition method (using partitioning to decompose numbers beforehand) to easily double single digits and multiples of ten and a hundred. The main activity provides opportunities to practise this for themselves and the alternative activity gives them the chance to 'be the teacher' as they spot doubling calculations that are correct or incorrect.

The final lesson in this series challenges your children to halve three- and four-digit numbers, introducing the chunking method as a way of doing this. The children will go through the examples of how to do this as a class, using the problems on the slides as an introduction, before having a go at this method independently. There is a fun alternative activity in this lesson which will have them competing to solve a calculation using fewer 'chunks' than their partner!