Over the last week, Room 8 have been introduced to some new strategies in maths to help them with their developing addition and subtraction skills.  I thought I would write a quick post explaining them through some examples, not only to help with your child’s learning at home but to keep you informed of how we do calculations in Year 3.

Addition

This is the expanded method where we introduce the children to adding in columns. At the moment, the children still need to keep learning the value of each digit therefore we are practising adding our ‘ones’ first, followed by our ‘tens’.

Subtraction

Below is the expanded method for subtraction. The first example is a very basic, easy example whereby the children simply separate out their number into its value and subtract. We emphasis the importance of subtracting from the ones column first.

Below is the slightly more challenging subtraction example because we need to ‘steal’ from its neighbour if the top digit can’t be subtracted.