Algebra (empty box mathematics)

Algebra is a topic formally introduced in Year 6. Your child will have already had some informal experience of algebra but will not have used the mathematical term.

For example, empty box calculations are very common throughout the primary school and finding an unknown quantity using known quantities is, in fact, algebra in its simplest form. This video shows an activity you could do with your child to help him/her to understand how to work out empty box calculations.

Here we only use a simple box wrapped in brown paper with a robot-like face drawn on it. At home, you could spend some time making a robot. Usually, when we did this at school, we used a large box for the robot's body and had the input and output slits on either side of the body. Our robot had arms but no legs. When un-used the robot sits in the corner of the classroom.

Having it there meant we could easily lift it out. This meant we could have little and often practise of this skill. Whenever we lifted the robot out of its resting place the excitement mounted, as the children loved being the one to sit inside the body and send out the answer cards. 

If you did this with your child, the robot could sit in your child's room or any spare corner of your home while not in use. When using the robot it is also fun to encourage your child to make robot noises while the output card is being decided on!  As well as being the robot (and working out the answers) you can use this with you being the robot and your child having to work out the function (or calculation) that is occuring inside the machine.