Let's Work It Out!
If your child practises number facts for 10 minutes a day, they could have an extra 70 minutes per week or 3,640 minutes each year developing their mental maths skills!
Intent - What are we trying to achieve?
Rationale
Mathematics equips pupils with the uniquely powerful set of tools to understand and change the world. These tools include logical reasoning, problem solving skills and the ability to think in abstract ways. Mathematics is important in everyday life, critical to science, technology and engineering, and necessary in most forms of employment. It is integral to all aspects of life and with this in mind we endeavour to ensure that children develop a healthy and enthusiastic attitude towards mathematics that will stay with them.
Aim of the National Curriculum
Children who have mathematical fluency are confidently able to apply their mathematical knowledge and skills both at school and in their daily lives.
The new national curriculum for mathematics aims that all pupils:
become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics, including through varied and frequent practice with increasingly complex problems overtime, so that pupils develop conceptual understanding and the ability to recall and apply knowledge rapidly and accurately
reason mathematically by following a line of enquiry, conjecturing relationships and generalisations, and developing argument, justification or proof using mathematical language
can solve problems by applying their mathematics to a variety of routine and non-routine problems with increasing sophistication, including breaking down problems into a series of simpler steps and persevering in seeking solutions
Aims and objectives @ YFPS
Our school is committed to delivering a ‘Mastery Curriculum’, which ensures continuity and progression in the teaching of mathematics. Within a unit of work, the time spent on teaching a specific learning objective or set of learning objectives depends on the needs of the children.
A ‘Mastery Curriculum’ is designed to create a learning atmosphere:
where all pupils can and will achieve
with a focus on the development of deep structural knowledge
developing rapid recall of key number facts
through carefully chosen examples and representations supporting the opportunity to make connections between mathematical ideas
keeping the class working together wherever possible
spending longer time on key topics to ensure depth of understanding
providing regular problem solving opportunities in familiar and unfamiliar contexts.
Implementation - How will we achieve this?
Children who have mathematical fluency are confidently able to apply their mathematical knowledge and skills both at school and in their daily lives.
The new national curriculum for mathematics aims that all pupils:
become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics, including through varied and frequent practice with increasingly complex problems overtime, so that pupils develop conceptual understanding and the ability to recall and apply knowledge rapidly and accurately;
reason mathematically by following a line of enquiry, conjecturing relationships and generalisations, and developing argument, justification or proof using mathematical language;
can solve problems by applying their mathematics to a variety of routine and non-routine problems with increasing sophistication, including breaking down problems into a series of simpler steps and persevering in seeking solutions.
Our school is committed to delivering a ‘Mastery Curriculum’, which ensures continuity and progression in the teaching of mathematics. Within a unit of work, the time spent on teaching a specific learning objective or set of learning objectives depends on the needs of the children.
A ‘Mastery Curriculum’ is designed to create a learning atmosphere:
Where all pupils can and will achieve
With a focus on the development of deep structural knowledge
Developing rapid recall of key number facts
Through carefully chosen examples and representations supporting the opportunity to make connections between mathematical ideas
Keeping the class working together wherever possible
Spending longer time on key topics to ensure depth of understanding
Providing regular problem solving opportunities in familiar and unfamiliar contexts.
Mathematical structures are the key patterns and generalisations that underpin sets of numbers – they are the laws and relationships that we want children to spot. Using different representations can help children to ‘see’ these laws and relationships.
Procedural variation – This is a deliberate change in the type of examples used and questions set, to draw attention to certain features.
Conceptual variation – When a concept is presented in different ways, to show what a concept is, in all of its different forms.
Planning, learning and teaching:
Mathematics is an interconnected subject in which pupils need to be able to move fluently between representations of mathematical ideas. The programmes of study are, by necessity, organised into distinct domains, but pupils should make rich connections across mathematical ideas to develop fluency, mathematical reasoning and competence in solving increasingly sophisticated problems. They should also apply their mathematical knowledge to science and other subjects.
The expectation is that the majority of pupils will move through the programmes of study at broadly the same pace. However, decisions about when to progress should always be based on the security of pupils’ understanding and their readiness to progress to the next stage. (In line with the government’s recently released document – ‘Ready to Progress Criteria’) Pupils who grasp concepts rapidly should be challenged through being offered rich and sophisticated problems before any acceleration through new content. Those who are not sufficiently fluent with earlier material should consolidate their understanding, including through additional practice, before moving on.
At Yealmpstone Farm Primary: Lessons provide the children with opportunities to ‘talk the mathematics’ speaking in full sentences to develop their mathematical vocabulary and consolidate their understanding of the maths being taught. Children are required to provide justification and reasoning for their answers. For example, ‘I know the shape is a square because….’
What is the concrete pictorial approach in maths?
At Yealmpstone Farm Primary we believe it is important that children develop a deep understanding of the mathematical concepts they are learning. Therefore we have changed our teaching of maths, taking on the concrete, pictorial, abstract (CPA) approach, which is a system of learning that uses physical and visual aids to build a child’s understanding of abstract topics.
Pupils are introduced to a new mathematical concept through the use of concrete resources (e.g. fruit, Dienes blocks etc). When they are comfortable solving problems with physical aids, they are given problems with pictures – usually pictorial representations of the concrete objects they were using alongside the abstract.
At Yealmpstone Farm Primary School, we are currently using the Number Sense programme every day, in an additional slot to our maths lesson. The programme builds on our innate ability to process quantities visually with graphics that expose mathematical structures. With animations and exercises with visual scaffolding, and a wide range of practical activities, a deep understanding of number and quantity is developed.
At the core of the programme are the Addition and Subtraction Fact Grids.
These essential facts are the equivalent of times tables for addition and subtraction. Just as all multiplication and division calculations use root times table facts, all future addition and subtraction calculations use these root addition and subtraction facts.
The programme teaches every addition and subtraction fact systematically. Just as schools can tell you where they teach each grapheme-phoneme correspondence in phonics, the Number Sense Maths Fluency Programme systematically teaches the facts and strategies leaving nothing to chance.
Impact - What difference will this make?
At YFPS, children:
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