Maths

Intent:

The aims of mathematics teaching at St Mary's are based on the three aims of the National Curriculum for mathematics: fluency, reasoning and problem solving.

At St Mary’s, there are three elements to the mathematical curriculum.

• Conceptual Understanding – to give children an integrated, relational and functional grasp of mathematics.
• Fluency – To give pupils the knowledge and skills to use and apply procedures in a range of contexts.
• Reasoning – To give pupils the language, methods, confidence and resilience to represent, reason about and solve problems which require knowledge of one or more concepts

Implementation:

In order to achieve the aims of this subject, there are several features that can be found within maths lessons, plans and schemes of work at St Mary's.

• Blocked planning – Planning is based on White Rose Maths planning. Units are blocked around a concept to encourage a deep understanding.
• Foundation facts – Within lessons, there are regular opportunities for revision/teaching of key number facts. These are matched to the age group to support all pupils in achieving their best.
• Anchor tasks and stem sentences – Within a lesson, children take part in solving an ‘Anchor Task’, an anchoring problem that provides an opportunity for children to activate prior knowledge, collaborate to find an answer, debate and discuss a misconception and use mathematical language. Stem sentences are used throughout lessons to anchor an idea, promote recall and fluency and the use of mathematical language for all children.
• Exploration tasks – Most lessons contain an ‘exploration task’ which is an opportunity for every student to engage with a reasoning or problem solving strand of maths.

Impact:

At St Mary's, teachers use a range of techniques to assess the impact of mathematics. These can include

• Day-to-day formative assessment
• Interim assessments
• End of Key Stage assessments.

Please find below useful documents to discover more about maths at St Mary's.