Our Mathematics Lead is Mrs. Dolman

Intent

By the time our children leave St Edward’s Catholic Primary School we hope that they will have a love of mathematics. We believe the purpose of mathematics is not solely to gain classroom based skills, but to develop enquiry and reasoning skills and inquisitive minds that will develop through life. We want our children to understand, as they progress through the school, that maths is not only essential to everyday life, necessary for financial literacy and most forms of employment but is also a fun and engaging experience. Our aim is to ensure that all children become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics and be able to solve problems. Through the mastering number programme our aim is for the children to develop number fluency with automaticity and develop number sense so they are not relying on counting to develop a deeper understanding of number to produce more efficient methods. Having a deeper number sense can then free up the mind to think about concepts and better help them to solve problems in the long run.

So our aim is to ensure that all pupils:

Become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics, including through varied and frequent practice with increasingly complex problems over time, 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 an 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.

Implementation

To ensure whole consistency and progression, the school uses the White Rose Scheme of work that is matched to the DFE’s National Curriculum. Alongside White Rose Maths, we use Learning by Questions (that follows the White Rose Framework interactively). In Early Years and KS1 the children use the mastering number programme alongside their normal White Rose lessons to develop their understanding of number. The children are set weekly maths homework using the online learning platform, Edshed which complements their maths learning for that week.

Mathematics is taught 5 times a week and offers the children the opportunity to have varied and frequent practice of their maths skills with the focus on their ability to recall and apply their knowledge rapidly and accurately. Reasoning is a key area in all our lessons as our children need to be able to describe, explain, convince, justify and prove to be successful in this subject. Mathematical vocabulary is an essential part of each lesson and the children need to understand this within the area they are studying and be able to make rich connections across other areas within this subject. Each lesson provides children with the opportunity to reason through their ideas, use their mathematical language to explore a line of enquiry to solve routine and non-routine problems.

Teaching will cater for the individual needs of the children and include some element of reasoning and problem solving. Challenging questioning is a key part of the maths lesson – allowing the children to demonstrate what they know and to extend their understanding with the key fundamental that all the children will have access to the same learning which is scaffolded to suit their needs.

NSPCC Number Day 2024

The whole school had an exciting day when we took part in Number Day to help raise money for NSPCC.

The children took part in lots of fun activities to widen their understanding of maths and use their skills and understanding of all areas of maths to complete lots of different problem solving activities and learn how much fun maths can be.