Max Maths, Year 4, Work Book, Mental addition

In the Max Maths Workbook for Year 4, students are encouraged to develop their mental addition skills through a series of practice exercises. The first set of exercises, Practice 2: Mental Addition, asks students to add numbers together by identifying pairs that sum up to 10 or 20. This technique helps to simplify the process and allows for quicker mental calculations. For example, in question 1(a), students would look at the numbers 8, 5, 5, 2, and 1 and notice that 5 and 5 make 10, and 8, 2, and 1 can be combined to make another 10, thus making the addition easier to compute.

The second part of the exercise reinforces the concept of adding single-digit numbers by presenting a set of problems that involve adding multiples of 10. This set of questions is designed to help students recognise patterns in addition and to apply their knowledge of basic addition facts to larger numbers. For instance, in question 2(a), students would add 20, 80, and 10, all of which are multiples of 10, making it straightforward to arrive at the total sum by simply adding the tens together. This method of addition is a fundamental skill that aids in building a strong foundation for more complex mathematical operations.