Common Mistakes in children's work

[This post is updated on 13 Jan 2012.]

Dear Parents

These are some of the common mistakes that the children had made when I came across while marking:

1. Spelling of number words (examples listed below)

• 411: four hundreds and eleven (children confuse spelling of number words with place value)
• 890: eight hundred and ninety (missing the word 'and'. Get them to verbalise as they write)
• 734: seven hundred and thirty-four (missing hypen)

2. Writing the wrong missing numbers in a given number sequence (examples listed below)

• e.g. 340, 360, 380, ____, 420. A few pupils have the tendency to fill in the missing numbers too quickly upon reading the question. They should look for any 2 adjacent numbers first and attain the difference. For e.g. the difference between 360 and 380 is 20. The difference between 340 and 360 is 20
• Next, we have to decide if the arrangement of the numbers is in an ascending or a descending order
• Since the arrangement of the numbers is an ascending order, we can say that the next number is always 20 more than the previous one. e.g. 360 is 20 more than 340 OR 20 more than 340 is 360.

Please remind your children at home when they are doing their homework. I will update this post again (if necessary) before I conclude the chapter "Numbers to 1000".

Thanks for your attention.

Miss Huang