In year 6, addition and subtraction continues to focus on formal written methods of columnar addition and subtraction, progressing to larger numbers, mental calculations with increasingly large numbers and more complex calculations and solving addition and subtraction multi-step problems in contexts. In addition to this, children are expected to be able to use all four operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) when solving problems and know how to use the order of operations to calculate an answer correctly.
This page aims to provide you with all the Year 6 Addition and Subtraction National Curriculum objectives, along with some guidance for each objective and a range of games and activities that can be used to meet the learning objective in a play-based way.
Teaching Year 6 Addition and Subtraction:
| National Curriculum Objective | Things to think about … | Playful Learning Games |
| Perform mental calculations, including with mixed operations and large numbers. | For this objective, children are expected to use their previous knowledge of mental strategies to answer questions. ‘Suko’ and Beware’ are good games to use to practise mental strategies with smaller numbers, before progressing onto larger numbers and applying the same strategies. Children may just want to use formal column methods to answer the questions so it is important to talk to them about why mental strategies are used with questions like these and how these can help in real-life situations. | Suko Beware |
| Use their knowledge of the order of operations to carry out calculations involving the 4 operations. | This objective is all about learning the order of priority for operations in a calculation: * calculations in brackets should always be done first * multiplication and division have equal priority * they should be performed before additions and subtractions. There are various models that can be used to teach this, pyramids or BODMAS/BIDMAS. One thing to look out for when using BODMAS/BIDMAS is that children may mistakenly think that addition should be done before subtraction, whereas in fact they have equal priority (as do multiplication and division). | Card Calculations Order of Operations |
| Solve addition and subtraction multi-step problems in contexts, deciding which operations and methods to use and why. | This is all about solving real-life problems, with multiple steps, that could include all four operations, not just addition and subtraction. The focus is on being able to decide which operation(s) are needed and in what order they need to be solved. Word problems are tricky as they are a lot of words, which can be overwhelming for children so they need to be taught how to break the problem down into simpler steps. The games and activities linked to this objective will all support solving multi-step problems. | Match the Vocab Maths Story Dice |
| Solve problems involving addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. | The main focus for this is that children are able to apply the different strategies they have learnt in key stage two to solve problems using all four operations. It is important that they think carefully about which method is the most effective to use and not just pick the same one every time. Think carefully about the vocabulary used in the problems which will help to identify which operation is needed. | Find the Operation Calculate and Find Maths Story Dice Match the Vocab |
| Use estimation to check answers to calculations and determine, in the context of a problem, an appropriate degree of accuracy. | This objective brings us back to rounding so some rounding game links have been included which may be useful as an recap here. The important thing for children to learn for this objective is that estimating is about checking to see if an answer to a calculation is correct. They should also be aware that estimating the answer can be done before or after an actual calculation. Children may need support with choosing where they round their number to, to make the calculation easy to do but also reliable to check the accuracy of their answer. | Rounding Fortune Tellers Rounding Shove Ha’Penny Estimation Tic Tac Toe |