Maths
Mathematics is a creative and highly inter-connected discipline that has been developed over centuries, providing the solution to some of history’s most intriguing problems. It is essential to everyday life, critical to science, technology and engineering, and necessary for financial literacy and most forms of employment. A high-quality mathematics education therefore provides a foundation for understanding the world, the ability to reason mathematically, an appreciation of the beauty and power of mathematics, and a sense of enjoyment and curiosity about the subject.
Intent
At Wellington, we follow the White Rose Maths scheme. This clearly set out the knowledge and skills we wish for children to gain at each stage of their learning journey through years 1-6.
It proposes the key mathematical concepts children will cover each year and the order in which they will learn them.
We strategically build upon prior learning by ensuring that all children recap and revisit previous year’s objectives to ensure security of earlier skills before moving forward. This ensures our curriculum is planned and sequenced to build upon prior learning.
Implementation
All teaching staff within our school use medium-term planning to ensure objectives and skills are sequenced accordingly to build upon the children’s prior learning and understanding.
Every lesson involves a deeper-thinking element consisting of a reasoning and/or problem-solving activity to promote mastery and mastery with greater depth.
All staff within our school use a bank of deeper-thinking questions, and useful sentence stems to use as a tool when planning and implementing deeper-thinking questions into their lessons.
Within our school, we ensure children are sufficiently challenged to further learning.
Deeper-thinking questions involve increasingly complex problems in new or unfamiliar contexts where the approach is not immediately obvious.
Children are given the opportunity to be creative mathematicians and take ownership over their learning where appropriate (for example through designing their own examples of problems).
All teaching staff understand how and when to use manipulatives to enable the children to explore abstract concepts practically.
Pictorial representations such as bar models and part-part-whole diagrams are used regularly and in various ways to both support and challenge learners.
Through our maths curriculum:
- - Pupils will gain skills that are transferrable to other subjects.
- - Reasoning and problem-solving forms part of all children’s daily maths practise.
Impact
Teacher assessment and Assessment points are carried out half-termly to monitor progress over the course of the year.
The end points that we wish for our children to reach when they leave primary school in mathematics are:
- - For children to have a real sense of number and confidence when calculating mentally.
- - To be able to recall key facts fluently and to use these to help them in later life.
- - For the children to become responsible and driven learners, who seize opportunities for development.
- - To be confident and articulate when commenting, reasoning and/or explaining (we ensure we use mathematical language and reasoning throughout our primary curriculum to promote this).
- - To be able to demonstrate and resilience when faced with challenge/problems, and to carry this skill with them into secondary school and later life.
- - To be able to apply skills they have learned when faced with something new and unfamiliar.
- - To have sound, secure knowledge of mathematical vocabulary and to use this confidently aloud and in writing.
- - To provide children with a mathematical skill-set that they will be able to draw upon and apply to further their life chances.
The national curriculum for mathematics aims 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.
Times Tables
As you may be aware there have been recent changes to the National Curriculum. One of the major changes is that children should be able to recall multiplication and division facts for multiplication tables up to 12x12, by the end of year 4.
Across the school we are having a huge push on learning our Times Tables. We have found that many of our children struggle to retain their knowledge of the tables and as they move onto learning a new table, they forget the ones they have learnt previously.
Each class has been allocated specific times tables which they will focus on within each year. These are shown below:
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Year 1 |
Counting in 2s and 10s. |
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Year 2 |
2, 5 and 10 times tables. |
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Year 3 |
3, 4 and 8 times tables (as well as already knowing the 2, 5 and 10 times tables). |
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Year 4 |
6, 7, 9, 11 and 12 times tables (as well as already knowing the 2, 3, 4, 5, 8 and 10 times tables). |
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Year 5 & 6 |
Children should already know all their times table facts and will be using these to solve trickier maths problems. These include equivalent fractions, multiplication and division word problems, area and many more! |
We will be working hard to learn times tables within school but we would also like children to be encouraged to practise them at home. Please ask for your child's maths teacher to provide you with their unique Times Table Rockstar password!
For children working on number bonds, they will also have a Numbots login and password, again ask your child's maths teacher for the password!
One way to learn your tables is by listening to the following songs:
Below are some links to multiplication activities that will develop your children's knowledge:
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Crickweb |
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Math Playground |
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Primary Resources |
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Teaching Tables |
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TVO Kids |
Other Useful Maths Websites
To aid your child’s learning in Maths at home, we have compiled a list of website addresses that you will find informative and entertaining. Enjoy!!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/ks1/maths/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/ks2/maths/
http://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/5-7-years/counting
http://www.topmarks.co.uk/Search.aspx?Subject=16&AgeGroup=2
http://www.topmarks.co.uk/Search.aspx?Subject=16&AgeGroup=3
http://www.ictgames.com/resources.html
http://www.bgfl.org/bgfl/index.cfm?s=1&m=220&p=136,index
http://resources.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/maths/
Maths Booklets
We have produced a booklet to give children and parents strategies to develop children's times tables. Please click here to access it.
For help in understanding what methods we use for calculations throughout the school, please see this helpful guide - click here.
