St Edmund's and St Thomas' Catholic Primary School

Mathematics

Mathematics is a creative and highly interconnected discipline that has been developed over centuries, providing the solution to some of history’s most intriguing problems. It is essential to everyday life, critical to science, technology and engineering, and necessary for financial literacy and most forms of employment.

A high-quality mathematics education therefore provides a foundation for understanding the world, the ability to reason mathematically, an appreciation of the beauty and power of mathematics, and a sense of enjoyment and curiosity about the subject. (National Curriculum, 2014)

Maths at St Edmund's and St Thomas'

Our ultimate aim at school is to provide all of our pupils with an enjoyable, creative and resourceful maths curriculum. Please read below to find the rationale behind our teaching.

We develop our pupils’ sense of enjoyment and curiosity about mathematics through practical, stimulating and creative teaching. As mathematics is such an important life skill, we have not only embraced the new curriculum, but have introduced a new ‘Mastery’ approach to our lessons.

The ‘White Rose’ scheme of learning is taught across the school, allowing pupils to spend longer on key mathematical concepts, most noticeably, number. During these longer units, pupils will see mathematics in a real life context, before moving at an appropriate pace from the concrete/pictorial approach.

Quality questioning underpins our philosophy for teaching mathematics. Questions are open ended and used as a basis for further questioning, to unpick misconceptions and deepen the children’s knowledge and understanding. The questions enable teachers to adapt their teaching to the needs of the children offering them opportunities to exceed expectations and add depth to their understanding.

We provide a range of reasoning and problem solving activities which are weaved throughout each aspect of mathematics and help give it a real life context. This helps children to think critically, look at all of the possibilities, identifying patterns and rules which they can apply to other contexts.

We adopt a CPA approach - moving from CONCRETE maths, to PICTORIAL representations before approaching ABSTRACT maths problems. This is to ensure that children have a sound understanding of 'what' maths is and why they are using certain calculations to obtain an answer.

Staff at our school are currently working along maths specialist in two key areas.

  • Our EYFS team are part of a new initiative, focused on the understanding of number. Parents of our reception children will be familiar with the 'number a week' approach which we are trialling this year. Our staff are extremely pleased with the children's response to this teaching, and have developed their own CPD extensively.
  • Miss Sharrock and Miss Plunkett have worked with a 'Maths Master' to help roll out the Mastery program across our school. Regular observations are carried out and meetings with clusters of school have proved to be extremely useful.
  • The development of the language of mathematics is critical to children making good progress and we employ stem sentences which include mathematical vocabulary in a highly structured sentence that provides a child to communicate their ideas with mathematical precision and clarity. You can see examples of these stem sentences in the files below.

Resources

The school has invested in several resources, which we use alongside the White Rose Maths planning.

Popcorn Arithmetic - our children's arithmetic skills are of upmost importance and at school we recognise that we must do all we can, from an early age, to help children carry out these formal and mental calculations. Weekly arithmetic practice takes place in all classes.

Headstart - a combination of reasoning, problem solving and mastery resources, planned alongside the WRM planning.

STOPS problem solving - providing children with the opportunity to use and apply their mathematical skills in a variety of ways. Children are exposed to 'find all possibility', 'patterns', 'simplify' and 'algebraic problems', as well as many others.

TimesTables Rockstars - at school we a really excited about our new subscription to TimesTables Rockstars. Please encourage your child to play at home too using this link...

Below are some alternative online maths resources you may want to have a look at:

Maths games - https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/3-5-years/counting 

Ten ways to help your child with maths - http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/joinin/numberblocks-help-your-child-with-maths 

Numberblocks (a BBC children’s show designed to help development of number) - https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08r41qb/numberblocks-series-2-ten-green-bottles 

 

Documents

 

 

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