It seems like yesterday you were counting pennies, leaves, and gold stars with your first grader. Now she’s taking sixth grade math. It’s a shock to lots of parents—and kids, too.

Here’s the good news: academic standards are designed to prepare children grade by grade and step by step. If your child has been working steadily through elementary school, sixth grade math will be just one more manageable step. In fact, studies show that when math is well taught, kids this age just love it—after all, it’s a way to discover sense and pattern in the world, and feel pretty darn smart in the process.

So what can you expect? Since states are allowed to choose their own standards under No Child Left Behind, there may be some variation. For specific details, remember to consult your state’s academic standards on the department of education website. It’s also wise to ask your school to show you its frameworks and texts, so that you can see exactly how the standards will be covered during the year.

In general, however, you can expect these themes in sixth grade math:

What should my child already know?

As a general rule, teachers hope that by the end of fifth grade students will have a very solid working knowledge of all four “operations”—addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division—along with fractions, simple percentages, decimals, and basic graphing. At a minimum, they should also know about basic formulas for perimeter, area, and geometrical shapes.

What should my child learn in this grade?

Number Sense: This builds directly on the basic skills of elementary school—addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, and decimals—but now more complex. Talk about these computations with your child: How does a fraction translate into decimals? Why do we call multiplication and division “inverse operations”? This is also the time when many teachers start to introduce negative numbers, which can be tricky. You can help with real-life situations, like “Yes, you can borrow $10 from me to afford that toy, but that means your account will go down to negative $10.”