Maths at Sacred HeartMath clipart 11 - Clipart World

“Without mathematics, there’s nothing you can do. Everything around you is mathematics. Everything around you is numbers.”

Shakuntala Devi

 

Intent

At Sacred Heart, we want every child to aspire to succeed and become fluent mathematicians. Our children need to develop the necessary skills to make them “deep thinkers” acquiring maths knowledge that can be recalled quickly and transferred and applied in different contexts resiliently. They need to be able to make rich connections across the areas of maths. Maths is the foundation for understanding the world and we want our children to know the purpose behind their learning and to apply their knowledge to their everyday lives.  We want children to have an appreciation of the wonder of maths. We want them to love maths.

 

Implementation

We want all children, regardless of home language, time of admission to school or starting points, to have access to the full mathematics curriculum, and to make progress in lessons. We follow the White Rose Scheme in order to ensure that our children have full coverage of the Maths National Curriculum and to allow our children to revisit topics several times over the year allowing their knowledge to be embedded. All children are catered for within the maths lessons ensuring that the teacher offers the necessary support and challenge for each individual to make progress towards their year group’s objectives. We ensure that maths is taught using a wide array of maths models and manipulatives to aid and support our children in their learning.  

  • Concrete – children have the opportunity to use concrete objects and manipulatives to help them understand and explain what they are doing.
  • Pictorial – children then build on this concrete approach by using pictorial representations, which can then be used to reason and solve problems.
  • Abstract – With the foundations firmly laid, children can move to an abstract approach using numbers and key concepts with confidence.

We encourage the deepest of learning for our children so that their knowledge can be transferred and applied in many contexts including other subjects e.g. science and art and their everyday lives. 

We ensure that the three core areas of the national curriculum are covered: fluency, reasoning and problem solving. We offer children the opportunity to have varied and frequent practice of their maths skills (Maths meetings, Flashback 4 and Times Tables Olympics) 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, especially for pupils for whom English is an additional language, 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. Maths lessons provide children with the opportunity to communicate their reasoning through the use of mathematical language to solve routine and non-routine problems. We work closely with the Archimedes Maths hub to develop the teaching of reasoning and varied fluency. 

We hope to build problem-solvers of the future, build resilience in our children and equip them with the essential skills they can use in all aspects of their learning.

To find out how our curriculum drivers are embedded in maths, click here.

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