Is your child struggling with Year 6 Maths?

If your young person is approaching the Year 6 SATs exam this spring and having a hard time with their maths, the time to start helping them work on it is now.

What convinces so many young people
that they are “bad at maths?”

Well... Imagine a scenario where, a few years ago, a child had a not-great experience in a maths class—perhaps they just didn’t connect well with the teacher for whatever reason, and so they struggled with the material, and maybe as a result they developed some negative feelings around maths.

This can happen in any subject, really. But the specific problem with maths is that maths is cumulative—which means that whatever they learned (or didn’t learn) that year is often the starting point for the material they have to learn the next year!

So if they missed something in Year 3, it probably came back to haunt them in Year 4, which led to more bad results and more frustration. And then THAT missed material came back to bite them again in Year 5…

You can see the spiral developing—and now there’s a big assessment coming up at the end of this year, and it seems we’ve got some work cut out for us to undo the damage.

So…how do we help frustrated young people get better at maths?

We help our students build a new relationship with maths—
by helping them approach it like a game!

The object of the game

Maths, at EVERY LEVEL, is all about creative problem solving. You get a piece of information, and you manipulate it until you find the missing piece of information the question is asking you about!

An arrow curling top-left to bottom-right

An arrow curling top-right to bottom-left

The moves

Focus on identifying, learning, and getting comfortable with specific Year 6 maths question types as you see them—things like adding or subtracting fractions, ratio sharing, and more!

Practise the moves in combination

Start with smaller groups of questions on related topics, and build outward until you’re comfortable with all the material!

Play the game

Take practise tests. Come up with them yourself, or ask your teacher or…you know…some friendly local outside educator to see if they can create some for you!

Some children who are already really discouraged might have trouble engaging with maths. Here’s how to help them get back on track.

A student who’s deep in their heads with the idea that they’re “bad at maths” needs, quite simply, to unlearn that belief. That doesn’t mean staring at themselves in the mirror and saying “I’m GREAT at maths!” over and over again every morning—because the brain has heard the opposite so many times that it will retort, “No I’m not!” and make the whole exercise useless. So instead…

Teach them to let go of self-judgment. Making a mistake does not mean a person is “stupid.” Nor does a bad result on an assessment, or a difficult year in a subject. Help them learn to stop beating themselves up over past performances and get into the game now!
(Read more about letting go of self-judgment here!)
‍Teach them to be willing to play badly at first. In this case, that has two meanings: first, like I said above, accept that mistakes are normal and natural, and that we can learn from them. The second thing is, they may have to re-learn some earlier material in order to catch themselves up to where they are in their current class!
(Read more about playing badly at first here!)
Teach them to stop assuming they have limitations! It’s not about telling themselves they’re ALREADY good—it’s about helping them unlearn the idea that they are stuck where they are! No one knows how good they can be at a game until they get there.
(Read more: "You Don't Know Your Limits!")

For more help with Year 6 maths, you can get in touch with us here or sign up for a 30 day free trial of MuchSmarter Games to help your child start practising on your own!