Max Maths, Year 5, Work Book, Multiplying by 25 mentally

The Max Maths workbook for Year 5 includes a section dedicated to the skill of mentally multiplying by 25. This particular exercise, Practice 4, is designed to help students enhance their mental arithmetic by handling multiplication questions involving the number 25. The instructions ask the students to not only find the product of each multiplication but also to note down the mental steps they used to arrive at their answers. This reflective approach encourages students to develop and articulate their mental strategies, which is a key aspect of mathematical understanding and fluency.

The exercise presents a series of multiplication problems, starting with simpler ones such as 25 times 6, and gradually increasing in complexity up to 25 times 22. For example, to solve 25 × 6, students might think of 25 as a quarter of 100, multiply 6 by 100 to get 600, and then take a quarter of that to find the answer, which is 150. Similarly, for 9 × 25, they might multiply 9 by 100 and then divide by 4 to get the answer of 225. By breaking down the multiplications into smaller, more manageable steps, students learn to compute mentally with greater ease and confidence. The workbook exercise continues with further multiplication problems, guiding students to apply their mental strategies consistently across different numbers.