The best way to learn about weight is to handle the weights and get ‘a feel’ of how much something weighs. The gram is a very small weight, so the kilogram is much better to handle, although this is rather heavy! This is probably one of the reasons why the British have been reluctant to [...]

Standard units of measurement are usually introduced in Year 2. Children should already be familiar with the metre and once they can count fluently to 100 and beyond the centimetre can also be introduced. Quite a tricky word to spell too! At first it is a good idea to practice drawing lines less than/about the [...]

The names of several shapes are introduced in Year 2, including the pentagon (5 sides) and hexagon (6 sides). This set of pages checks the properties of these shapes and also includes a Carroll diagram for sorting them by shape and colour. This can be quite tricky for young children and it is always a [...]

Little can be found on 3D shape when browsing for maths worksheets, yet it is an important part of maths throughout the curriculum. This page looks at making shapes out of 5 cubes. Four 5-cubed shapes are drawn on paper and the first task is to try and make them. You need interlocking cubes for [...]

For this activity you need a pair of balance scales, a  number of cubes, small bricks, marbles or coins and some small toys. The idea is to weigh the small toys by using the bricks/marbles. Pick up a small toy, hold it and make an estimate, or guess, as to how many cubes will balance [...]

Here is another simple idea to help children understand measuring capacity. At this early stage non standard units of measurement are used eg a cup or a glass full rather than the standard litres and ml. You need a small saucepan and a selection of different cups, mugs, glasses etc. Try to avoid containers which [...]

Folding to create symmetrical patterns is a popular past-time in schools. These maths worksheets are quite tricky as they ask children to colour the correct spots on the other side of the line of symmetry to make sure that the shape is symmetrical. Pegboards are a useful aid to this work, as is a mirror, [...]

Early measurement is all about comparisons. Long before  starting to use standard units of measurement such as metres, children need to be able to make sensible comparisons. For this set of worksheets the comparisons are all to do with measurement, using the terms thick, thicker, thickest and thin, thinner and thinnest. Remember, thickest and thinnest [...]

It is quite hard to find maths worksheets on anything other than number, but here we have four pages which look at the early stages of measurement, in particular the use of tall and short. Young children will not be using standard units of measurement, such as centimetres, but they will need to be able [...]

Halves are usually the first fraction which children come across and these four worksheets look at how to colour or divide shapes into half. They have been designed so that it can be seen that a shape can be divided in half in a number of different ways: the important mathematical concept is that each [...]