Verbs

We use lots of words every day and lots of those words are verbs.  A verb is a type of word that tells us about something that happens.

The dog ate my homework.

I've highlighted the verb in this sentence.  The word "ate" tells us what happened.  The other words around it tell us who did it (the dog) and what they did it to (my homework).  Every sentence in English has at least one verb, because the purpose for writing or saying a sentence is to tell us about something.

Run!

 

Here we only have one word in the whole sentence, but that one word is still a verb.  It tells us about an action - running.

 

Verbs also give us an idea of "when".  The word "ate" tells us that the homework has already been eaten - it happened in the past.  "Run" is an instruction (also known as an "imperative verb", which we'll cover in a later lesson) and therefore is going to happen in the future.

 

The dog is eating my homework.
 





Here the action is happening right now.  It's still the dog eating the homework, but it hasn't already happened - there's a chance that we could get the homework back from the dog.

 

The dog will eat my homework.

 

The action in this sentence hasn't happened yet - it's a prediction for the future.

Addition - the basics

Addition is when we find the total of two or more numbers.  We can use counting to add two single digit numbers.

Let's imagine that a bookshop sells 3 books in the morning, and then sells 2 books in the afternoon.

If the owner wanted to find out how many books she had sold in total then she could count them up:

1... 2... 3...    from the morning's sales

4... 5...          from the afternoon's sales

Therefore, she sold 5 books over the course of the day.  What the bookshop owner has done is to add up 3 and 2.

3 + 2 = 5

We can use our fingers to add up single digit numbers.

3 fingers (well, a thumb and two fingers) represents the first three books.  Then put up another finger for the first book from the afternoon, and another for the second book from the afternoon.

Adding up is a very important skill.  You'll do lots of adding up as you do more and more maths.

Place value

When we write a number with more than one digit, each of those digits has a different value, depending on its position.  We call this "place value".

 

H, T and U mean "Hundreds", "Tens" and "Units".  Because the 2 is in the hundreds position here it's not just two, it's actually two hundred.  This is very important, because without place value we could never make numbers that are bigger than 9.

We can split this number up into its parts like this:

We can use place value to help us to convert numbers from digits to words and from words to digits.  For instance, take the number "three hundred and nine".  From the words we know that there is a 3 in the hundreds column, and another 9 units:

There's a zero (0) in the tens column because it wasn't mentioned in the words.

When we start to add, multiply, subtract and divide large numbers, place value becomes even more important, so keep that in mind.

See if you can convert these numbers into words:

207
720
217

And see if you can convert these numbers into digits:

four hundred and ten
seventy-two
one hundred and fifteen