Mathematics
Vision
Our vision at Netherthorpe Primary school is to ensure that high quality teaching and learning in mathematics introduces our children to the knowledge, skills and thinking strategies that are useful in everyday life. We believe that most real-life problems and employment, require confidence and competence in a range of basic mathematical skills and knowledge. It is an important context for developing problem solving strategies that have real life significance. Through our exciting curriculum, we recognise the importance of developing these skills in problem solving, reasoning, creative thinking and communication; a wide range of mathematical resources using the concrete, pictorial and abstract principles develop both conceptual and procedural understanding. We provide our children with a range of activities to explore and understand different areas of Maths, creating genuine enjoyment and pleasure whilst enabling them to understand the importance of maths in everyday life.
Curriculum Aims:
- To foster positive attitudes, fascination and excitement of discovery through the teaching and learning of mathematical concepts.
- Learning is broken down into small connected steps that gradually unfold the concept, providing access for all children and leading to a generalisation of the concept and the ability to apply the concept to a range of contexts.
- Use of core representations to expose important mathematical structures and ideas.
- Taught ideas are understood deeply, actively received and worked on reasoned with and discussed with others to ensure high levels of mathematical thinking.
- Quick and efficient recall of facts and procedures and the flexibility to move between different contexts and representations of mathematics.
- Variation in how the concepts are represented and the tasks and activities that are sequenced within the lesson. Variation to connect the mathematics and draw attention to mathematical relationships and structure.
- Key concepts, knowledge and skills are explicitly planned and taught to link to childrens’ prior knowledge and future applications.
- Consistent use of the same representations across year groups help to connect prior learning to new learning.
- The development and use of precise and accurate language for children to use to capture, connect and apply important mathematical idea’s.
- To make important connections across different areas of maths are made within and across year groups from EYFS to KS2.
- Children are able to choose and use efficient calculation methods for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
- Children have automatic recall of a core set of multiplicative and additive facts to enable them to focus on learning new concepts.
Intent:
We have scrutinised and considered a range of factors to ensure that our Mathematics curriculum is ambitious and designed to give all our learners the knowledge and cultural capital they need to succeed in life. We have ensured that teaching and learning is coherently planned and sequenced towards cumulatively sufficient knowledge and skills for future learning.
In EYFS all children develop firm mathematical foundations in a way that is engaging, and appropriate for their age. The following six key areas underpin the knowledge in our EYFS curriculum: cardinality and counting, comparison, composition, pattern, shape and space, and measures. In Nursery the children follow the number blocks programme and in Foundation 2, children are taught using the NCTEM mastering number programme, which is carefully sequenced to enable pupils to build their knowledge and skills in the areas of subitising, cardinality, ordinality, counting, composition and comparison. The ‘Word Aware’ Concept programme is used to deliver the teaching of mathematical concepts and measures. By the end of Foundation our aim is for the children to reach a good level of development, having acquired a deep understanding of numbers to 10 and numerical patterns.
In Key Stage One and Two, gaps have emerged in pupils’ knowledge and skills due to numerous lockdowns and isolation periods, we are addressing these gaps using the NCTEM curriculum prioritisation documents to establish a coherent sequence for our primary maths curriculum. Our experienced teachers systematically and explicitly ensure that children are acquiring the intended knowledge and skills in the of areas of number and place value, number facts, addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, fractions and geometry from Y1 to Y6. Our curriculum covers the full mathematics national curriculum but priority is given to those areas covered by the ready-to-progress criteria from the DfE guidance. Some content has been moved from one year group programme of study to another within the same key stage. This is to improve coherence and to align with the ready-to-progress criteria contained within the DfE guidance to allow for in-depth teaching at a more appropriate point.
KS1 and Y3 are also taught the daily NCTEM mastering number programme which is carefully sequenced to enable pupils to build their knowledge and skills in the areas of subitising, cardinality, ordinality, counting, composition, comparison, addition, subtraction and number facts.
By the end of Key Stage one and two, our children are expected to know, apply and understand the matters, skills and processes specified in the relevant programmes of study.
