“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
Our Vision for Maths:
Shaping Our Maths Curriculum:
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, including 'Graffiti Maths' which gives 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.
The main areas taught are:
- Number and place value,
- Addition, subtraction,
- Multiplication and division
- Fractions
- Measurement
- Geometry: Properties of shape, position and direction
- Statistics
- Algebra, ratio and proportion at year 6.
Our Maths curriculum is also drawn from:
Singapore Maths
Our approach to mathematics teaching is based on Singapore Maths. 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 Singapore method 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.
This effective Maths approach is supported further by the use of ‘Maths No Problem’ textbooks, in Year 1, Year 2, Year 3, Year 4 and Year 5 which are based on the Singapore approach.
Here are some links to further explain this approach:
http://www.mathsnoproblem.co.uk/parent-videos
http://www.mathsnoproblem.co.uk/singapore-maths
http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/0/24925787
Features of Singapore Maths:
- Emphasis on problem solving and comprehension, allowing students to relate what they learn and to connect knowledge
- Careful scaffolding of core competencies of : visualisation as a platform for comprehension, mental strategies to develop decision making abilities, pattern recognition, to support the ability to make connections and generalise
- Emphasis on the foundations for learning and not on the content itself so students learn to think mathematically as opposed to merely reciting formulas or procedures.