When we are at school we often start the day with Early Morning Work when the children come into school. This is a 5-10 minute activity the children complete independently to recap previous learning and practise new skills.

Here are some examples if you would like to do this at home.

Mental Maths Challenge - choose your own level and own category. Select a time and then see if you can beat it the following day.

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/daily10

Ten questions. Write a variety of maths questions down and get children to write the answers AND show their working out. Doing this helps you to see where they have gone wrong. Here's an example...

Stick to-

1 or 2 digit addition and subtraction

2, 3, 5 and 10 times tables and division

fractions including 1/2, 1/4, 2/4, 3/4, 1/3, 2/3

You could even then try some trickier number sentences such as..

? + 18 = 47         16 + 25 = 49 - ?

What's the question? Give children any 1 or 2 digit number. Tell them it's the answer and they need to think or as many questions as they can. For example- The answer is 9.

8+1 = 9     7+2=9     6+3=9     5+4=9     3x3=9     10-1=9

Spellings. Pick 5 or 6 words and get your child to write them out. Can they write them into a sentence?

Ordering numbers. Provide 3 or 4 numbers (increasing if you can) and get children to put them in order either from smallest to largest or largest to smallest. But they need to prove it by drawing the tens and ones. 

Up-levelling. Prove a simple sentence and see if your child can up-level it. For example - He sat on the chair. He carefully sat down on the old chair because it looked like it might break. I saw a butterfly. I saw a beautiful butterfly land on a bright yellow flower. 

Adjectives. Show children a picture of something (cat, fish, flower) and get them to write 8 different adjectives to describe it. Can they write a sentence about it?

These are just a few activities which shouldn't take more than 5-10 minutes and may help to get children motivated.  Always start easier and build up to higher numbers / more numbers / more complex number sentences.