Maths
Subject Lead: Mr Coxon
We are committed to delivering a high-quality mathematics education where all children thrive.
We aim to explore the purpose of maths - why it is important to learn maths and how it impacts on our daily lives. We try wherever possible to include examples of real-life situations that link to the maths we are learning, whether this is as basic as counting money for a shop to measuring the area of a floor for new carpets!
Carefully planned lessons, in which the teachers consider the prior learning of the children and the needs/individual targets of some pupils, are key in ensuring that support is targeted appropriately. Teachers identify the key vocabulary required for a lesson, make links to key skills required to make good progress and outline what success will look like in a lesson.
Long-term planning considers the best order to introduce key skills to pupils. For example, we would not expect children to convert measurements until they have understood the basic skills of multiplying by 10, 100 or 1000. For this reason, children are taught to be fluent in their recall of facts and procedures, moving on to identifying links from those to other areas of work once they are secure.
We base our progression of learning on the White Rose Maths Scheme. To learn mathematics effectively, some things have to be learned before others, e.g. place value needs to be understood before working with addition and subtraction, addition needs to be learnt before looking at multiplication (as a model of repeated addition). You will see this emphasis on number skills first, carefully ordered, throughout our primary curriculum. For some other topics, the order isn’t as crucial, e.g. Shapes and Statistics need to come after number, but don’t depend on each other. We try to mix these so pupils have as wide a variety of mathematical experiences as possible in each term and year.
We assess against each objective, taking care to note who may require extra support in or before future lessons as well as those who may have missed some teaching due to absence. This assessment is reported to parents at three points in the year: at the parents meetings in November, the mid-year report in March and the end of year report in July. Pupils lacking progress, those with SEND outcomes and children with external agency support may receive more frequent updates.
To support our teaching of the learning objectives we have used the Ready to Progress document to put together some Key Instant Recall Facts also known as KIRFs. These are facts that we would like each child within each year group to know off by heart.
Most importantly, we want children to enjoy maths and believe they can achieve.
In order to support the teaching of Maths both at school and - should any further remote learning be required for any unforeseen reason - at home, the following pages contain a number of links to the teaching progression documents we have access to in school, ideas for games for external providers, worksheets and resources that can be used to support teaching. If you would like to help your children at home, this could be a good starting point for you.
EYFS
Early Maths
Throughout Early Years we spend lots of time practicing our early maths skills both inside and inside. We practice careful counting, naming; numbers, shapes, colours and patterns in all areas of the curriculum. We build maths into all areas of provision and enjoy singing number songs as part of our maths learning.
Please see our main Early Years page for more information and pictures to show examples of learning that is taking place in our setting.