This week in Year 4, we started our new maths topic of understanding and comparing different amounts of money. Firstly, we recapped our knowledge of money and exactly what coins and notes we can use when paying for things. We spoke about the different shapes and colour of coins which can help to easily identify which coins we would need to understand different amounts.
Across the week, we have been working on using different methods to focus on using various combinations of coins to make the same amount. We did this by having a set amount and seeing if our learning partners would come up with the same arrangement of coins as us or not. We had to check our learning partners work on their whiteboards to see if they had calculated it correctly!
Later in the week, we started to convert between pence and pounds with the important part of using the £ sign to write the amount of what items cost. We tackled problems involving when items were listed in either pounds or pence and had to convert them all to the same denomination first before ordering them in the correct place. The word expensive came up quite a lot so we discussed the meaning of this and saw that questions would ask us to find items that were either the least or most expensive.
Next, we used coins (plastic ones of course!) to show exactly how amounts could be made up and wrote them out using the £ sign and a decimal point to clearly show the pounds and pence within our amounts. Again we worked with our learning partners to check that we had done this correctly otherwise we might not be able to afford any of the items! Lastly, we had a go at completing some money challenges to work on strengthening our knowledge of money!
Well done Year 4 on a fantastic week of applying your mathematical knowledge to problems! What was your favourite part of the week?
