“An Adventure for the Mind, and a Home for the Heart”
“UN Rights of a Child Article 2: A child has rights, whatever their ethnicity, gender, religion, language or abilities. Whatever they think or say, whatever their family background.”
Maths
Intent
- Children to have a solid understanding of number, shape and measure.
- To develop children who are independent learners and can use a range of strategies to solve different mathematical problems.
- To develop children to understand the context of maths in the wider world and be prepared for later life.
- To provide learning experiences that encourage a reasoning and mastery approach.
- To develop children who are confident to independently use a range of concrete and pictorial resources to aid their learning.
The Maths curriculum at our school focuses on encouraging children to question, reason, investigate and solve problems. We use a variety of strategies to allow this, which give children the opportunity to explore their thinking and ideas. Wherever possible, practical, ‘real’ activities are used to introduce concepts, transfer skills learnt and reinforce learning objectives, ensuring the children are engaged through enjoyable, stimulating activities.
Our approach to mathematics teaching is based on a mastery approach. The principles are based on a concrete – pictorial – abstract – cycle of learning. There are many reasons that this approach develops understanding so well, but one key factor is that it is step-by-step and can be used at home or in the classroom.
The mastery approach begins by allowing children to start learning about Maths by playing with real objects, blocks or cut-out pictures. They build confidence with the basic ideas of adding and taking away. There is then a second stage of drawing pictures representing the objects. And only later do they gradually start to add numbers to their drawings.
Previously a Maths No Problem school, our curriculum is now evolving to give teachers more flexibility in what and how they teach maths. Our school is moving towards using the NCETM maths overviews for the year, which set out when each topic will be covered in each year group. Through repetition and encouraging thinking through a variety of strategies, questions and models, we ensure children are fluent in the different areas of maths, before applying their skills to reasoning and problem solving tasks. Teachers have begun to plan and teach maths lessons to ensure children are making connections across a range of concepts taught, but with regular opportunities to revisit and retrieve prior learning, and make links to new ideas. This way of teaching begins in our EYFS and continues through the school to the end of Key Stage 2. In EYFS and KS1, teachers will also be launching Mastering Number, a government funded project which aims to secure firm foundations in the development of good number sense for all children from Reception through to Year 1 and Year 2.