Quiz: How tough are these maths puzzles for 6-year-olds?

Daily Mail

30 Nov, 2017 11:00 PM2 mins to read

Can you figure out the answers? Photo / Getty Images

Do these five maths challenges fill you with dread or do they seem less scary than the ones you remember from your school days?

If you sailed through them with full marks, it's because they are from the new Asian-style maths teaching techniques that are designed to be simpler and make children sharper, with many schools across the UK starting to weave them into their own lesson plans, the Daily Mail reports.

The approach focuses on deepening understanding by using physical objects and pictures to explore traditional maths symbols, as well as spending more lesson time developing reasoning and problem-solving skills.

These particular examples are from the free full curriculum that Tes - a school resource body - produces for years 1-6 of primary school. So can you figure out the answers?

• Scroll down for the answers

Tes launched a collection of maths education resources to help more schools looking to use the Shanghai and Singapore approach.

Discussing the new techniques, Laura Beeson, Assistant Head Teacher at Primrose Hill Primary School in London, said: "We are still on the start of our mastery journey.

"It is important that we don't see the Shanghai approach as simply a method that we can pick up and use in our own school settings.

"The differences both within our school systems and culture are vast. It is up to us as practitioners to look at the fundamental values of the approach and see how they can be implemented in our own UK school settings.

"As a school we have started by focusing on three of the main aspects of mastery teaching: taking slow steps and dedicating more time to concepts before moving on, the use of models and images to support understanding and the importance of variation - seeing the same concept in many different ways.

"Finding resources that contain that variation of the same concept is one of the main barriers for our teachers. The Tes primary maths mastery space is a central place to look for this - giving teachers a starting point."