Grace has been loving doing the new maths work she has been presented – addition. Yesterday morning I went in to see how it works.

First you get an addition card, in this case, 8434 + 1464. This is the basic addition, as there are no carries in the sum. Then you put the numbers out, thousands, hundreds, tens and units. Each is on a different coloured card, and sized so that they lie on top of each other. Then off to the shelf to collect the thousands cubes, hundreds squares, tens beads and unit beads.

Collect each number (one digit at a time) and lay them out next to each other.

Once you have the two numbers as a set, combine and count. Then put down a card for the thousands, hundreds, tens and units.

And that’s how you add up two numbers to get 9898.