At Woodhouse Primary School we encourage our pupils to be confident, resilient mathematicians with a love of learning and no fear of ‘grappling’ with difficult concepts and those expressed in an unfamiliar way. In our school, children are scaffolded, extended and supported through rapid teacher intervention, use of equipment and choice of strategies e.g. jottings/mental/resources. As such, teaching is both enabling and extending.
We aim that all pupils:
Become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics so that they develop the conceptual as well as procedural understanding that underpins a concept and the ability to recall and apply knowledge rapidly and accurately.
Can reason mathematically by following a line of enquiry and develop and present a justification, argument or proof using mathematical language.
Can solve problems by applying their mathematics to a variety of problems with increasing sophistication, including unfamiliar contexts and real-life scenarios.
Can use the language of mathematics accurately discussing their learning with confidence and precision.
In mathematics lessons you will see:
Teachers and children having fun and demonstrating positive ‘can do’ attitudes.
High expectations of learning where ALL children are challenged and ‘grappling’ with concepts; they will demonstrate resilience and independence.
Insistence on mathematical terminology being used accurately and confidently to explain learning and understanding.
Children confidently using resources from around the classroom to support their learning.
Well-designed lessons to build upon previous learning to help learners to remember in the long term. g. repetition of stem sentences for ‘sticky knowledge’; small steps; layered learning to enable and extend.
Timely and rapid interventions to address misconceptions.
Effective questioning where teachers adapt learning within the lesson to support the progress of all learners.
Application of skills to non-standard situations including the use of non-examples to challenge thinking.
Our definition of mastery:
Mastery is not just being able to memorise key facts and procedures. Mastery of the curriculum requires that all pupils:
use mathematical concepts, facts and procedures appropriately, flexibly and fluently;
recall key number facts with speed and accuracy and use them to calculate and work outunknown facts;
have sufficient depth of knowledge and understanding to reason and explain mathematical concepts and procedures and use them to solve a variety of problems.
Developing mastery with greater depth is characterised by pupils’ ability to:
solve problems of greater complexity (i.e. where the approach is not immediately obvious), demonstrating creativity and imagination;
independently explore and investigate mathematical contexts and structures;
communicate results clearly and systematically explain and generalise the mathematics.
In order to ensure progression we use the maps which have been produced by the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics (NCETM). The maps are structured and divided into sub categories to illustrate progression in key areas. Some statements appear twice and this is because the objectives have central relevance to more than one maths topic. This embraces our aim that pupils should make rich connections across mathematical ideas to develop fluency, mathematical reasoning and competence in solving increasingly sophisticated problems.
Bespoke progression documents for specific key areas also ensure that teachers are able to plan learning opportunities which enable pupils to transfer, build upon and deepen their knowledge and understanding.
Cohort overviews are the working documents that teachers use to plan. These are working documents and are adapted in response to pupils’ outcomes.
At Woodhouse, we use White Rose Maths resources regularly in our maths teaching. They have created short videos/lessons with related worksheets and answer sheets.
This website has free teaching videos, worksheets and answers with differing levels of difficulty! It also has handy ‘5 a day’ mental maths resources that would be good to keep the children ticking over with their key skills.