Year 5 · Autumn term · Addition and subtraction · Step 6
Year 5 Multi-step addition and subtraction problems worksheets
Solve problems that need more than one step. A free editable Word sheet with eight fluency and six reasoning questions. The answers follow the questions: the same sheet again with every answer in red.
Download the worksheets
Print on A4 portrait: every page carries the sheet twice, side by side, so you can cut down the middle and two pupils each get a half to stick in their books. Every question sits in its own box and pupils write their answers in their book. The answers follow the questions in the file: the same sheet again with every answer in red. It opens in Word, Google Docs, Pages and LibreOffice, so you can change numbers, delete questions or add your own. There is no scaffolded version of this step yet.
Not scaffolded sheet
The same questions without the extra support. For pupils working at the expected standard: eight fluency questions first, then the reasoning questions.
Sample questions from this step
These are real questions from the first set of the sheet (two from the fluency page, two from the reasoning page). Open each one to see the answer.
- Eva reads a book at bedtime. On Monday she reads 43 pages. On Tuesday she reads 5 more pages than on Monday. The book has 139 pages.a) How many pages does she read on Tuesday? ____b) How many pages does she read on Monday and Tuesday altogether? ____c) How many pages does she have left to read? ____
Show the answer
48; 91; 48
- A school has 849 exercise books. It orders 4,236 more. During the year 2,377 books are used.How many exercise books are left for next year? ____
Show the answer
2,708
- The sum of two numbers is 12,766. The difference between the numbers is 1,782.The bigger number is ____The smaller number is ____
Show the answer
7,274; 5,492
- Annie opens a book and sees two facing pages. The two page numbers are next to each other and add up to 457.What is the number of the next page after these two pages? ____
Show the answer
230
What is on each sheet
- Fluency: eight questions that start easy and get harder, with the key skill of the step practised in different ways.
- Reasoning: questions with pictures, tables and number lines (spot the mistake, true or false and explain, puzzles with one answer, an open-ended task).
- Answers in the same file: the sheet again with every answer in red, so there is only one file to download.
- Boba characters give the instructions in speech bubbles. They are decoration only.
Why one set of questions?
- Everyone works on the same content, and support comes from scaffolds instead of different, easier tasks. This follows the mastery approach described by the NCETM and the thinking in Ofsted's 2021 mathematics research review.
- Worked examples and visual representations lighten the load for pupils who need it, as the Education Endowment Foundation describes.