Kelsale CEVC Primary School

Rationale Statement:

In Maths at Kelsale, we aim to enable our pupils to develop skills and knowledge to help them make sense of the world around them. By achieving this, our children will have the confidence to embrace real-life mathematical problems that they encounter throughout their learning journey. In our Mathematics curriculum, we believe that Maths is about exploring, mastering skills across the topics, and developing a broad and deep understanding of how the topics intertwine. It involves exploring all the objectives through activities which contextualise the skills and knowledge, thus ensuring that the children’s lessons are relative to their own lives and experiences. Based on our experiences, the curriculum has been sequenced so that the children’s prior knowledge is built upon, not only year by year, but also termly. This will enable our children to be familiar with previous representations to then develop a deeper understanding of a topic using previously attained skills. All children will be supported and encouraged through the teaching of geography to develop their learning behaviours.

Intent:

At Kelsale CEVCP School, we have structured a well-sequenced Mathematics curriculum in order for our learners to build upon their prior knowledge. The Mathematics curriculum is about creating curiosity for the world around us and developing problem solving skills with perseverance to situations the children may encounter. Our curriculum entails the statutory fluency objectives as well as teaching these through reasoning and problem solving. Therefore, our curriculum encourages the children to become critical thinkers in how they approach problem solving activities by applying their existing knowledge and strategies that they have been taught. This also improves their curiosity as they discover that there are many solutions to solve one problem and they can explore how to find all possibilities that exist. We aim for our children to also show compassion in their Maths lessons as they are encouraged to develop the skill of collaborating with others using peer support. Our curriculum also develops our pupil’s creative skills by modelling how to present their work systematically and creating their own pictorial representations to support their learning. Finally, our Maths curriculum improves the verbal and written communication skills of our pupils by encouraging them to verbalise their explanations and reasoning using appropriate Mathematical vocabulary, which is taught throughout the topics. All of these skills are those that can be transferred into other curriculum areas but also build upon previous knowledge and skills that have been taught in previous year groups.

Implementation:

Mathematics is taught daily, as well as beginning each day with arithmetic practise to ensure that key mathematical concepts within the four operations are embedded, and children can recall this information to see the links between topics in Maths. We believe that times tables practise is also integral to Maths with children developing their fluency in rapid recall of tables up to 12 x 12 by the end of Year 4. Thus, daily times tables practise occurs in year groups 1-6 with their respective tables.

At the start of each mathematical topic, the children receive a knowledge organiser, which outlines key strategies and vocabulary that they will require to apply to their activities. The children also receive high-quality Maths lessons that are carefully sequenced to build on prior knowledge and allow for progression in depth following the fluency, reasoning and problem-solving methodology. Our teachers follow the Mastery approach so that our lessons reflect the knowledge of our pupils and do not move on until the children have grasped the concept. As well as this, those who did not meet the learning intention for the lesson are given a same-day intervention to support children to ensure children are ready for their next Maths lesson. Termly assessments are used as a diagnostic tool to ensure that teachers are adapting learning to meet the needs of all children and ensure that any necessary interventions are targeted specifically to meet the needs of children.

Within each of these lessons, our teachers following the Concrete-Pictorial-Abstract approach in line with our school’s calculation policy. Within this, we have 5 core models of representation including: tens frames, Base 10, number lines, part-part-whole and bar model. These are used to support our children in the concrete and pictorial aspects of lessons before they are able to reach the abstract level of understanding. Children are familiar with these resources and can access them independently where needed. Lessons are personalised to each class and differentiated within the classrooms to ensure that each child is given the appropriate level of scaffolding and manipulatives required to meet the learning intention. This enables our Maths lessons to be inclusive of a range of abilities where children can access the concept at their own level. Furthermore, Maths homework is set on a weekly basis in order to consolidate the children’s learning in the previous week. Where possible, Mathematical links are also made with other subjects across the curriculum, for example: pattern seeking in Art, drawing and interpreting line graphs in Science, measurement in Design and Technology etc.

Impact:

The impact of our Mathematics curriculum is that children understand the relevance and importance of what they are learning in relation to real world concepts. Children know that Maths is a vital life skill that they will rely on in many areas of their daily life. In addition, they have a positive view of Maths due to learning in an environment where the subject is promoted as being an exciting and they can ‘laugh’ whilst learning as part of our whole school vision. We embrace mistakes and use this as a learning opportunity as the journey to finding an answer is most important. Children are confident to choose the manipulatives they need to help them to learn along with the strategies they think are best suited to each problem.

Our children have a good understanding of their strengths and targets for development in Maths and what they need to do to improve. In our Maths books, there is evidence of a high standard of work which children clearly take pride in whilst the range of activities demonstrate good coverage of fluency, reasoning and problem solving to challenge all learners. Our live marking, verbal feedback and interventions support children to strive to be the best Mathematicians they can be whilst ensuring a high proportion of children are working at age-related expectations or above.