Cherrywood Community Primary School
Maths
Mathematics is a creative and highly inter-connected discipline that has been developed over centuries. It is essential to everyday life, critical to science, technology and engineering, and necessary for financial literacy and most forms of employment. Maths at Cherrywood fosters ambition for their futures.
At Cherrywood School, through the teaching of mathematics, we promote the ability to reason mathematically, apply learning in deep meaningful contexts, and a sense of enjoyment and curiosity about the subject.
Our curriculum is designed to foster pupil understanding over time and is inclusive of a range of prior starting points. Our teachers know that children learn at different rates and we adapt our curriculum to meet the needs of all individuals to progress in gaining and using new mathematical understanding over time.
To ensure this happens, our teachers use a rich context to introduce new concepts. We try to make this real and link with something the children can hook the learning onto. We might start thinking about how we use maths at a supermarket or when we visit the beach using our team work skills to make sense of the real life maths. As we begin to explore concepts with the children we will ensure they have concrete experiences to build and feel the maths before moving on to capture this as pictorial drawings and models which they can refer to and finally ensure children can work in abstract conditions to embed understanding and build competency.
We are developing a mastery approach to learning and aim to promote mathematical thinking through talk. We provide plenty of opportunities to build reasoning and problem solving elements into the curriculum whilst also focusing on developing pupils’ fluency. Our children will learn how to be resilient when using mathematics that is challenging and makes them think deeply. We use pre-teaching and re-teaching sessions to further embed and support pupil’s overcoming barriers to enable all children to make progress.
The principal focus of the mathematics teaching in our school is as follows:
- In EYFS, the children learn to be confident counters and understand the value of the different numbers within 10. We foster children’s curiosity with stimulating environments and activities where they can use maths in a fun way while learning at the same time. You might not see us writing much of our maths but we learn to use our brains and understand the early concepts deeply. Children will build, draw and say the maths that they are exploring.
- Key stage 1 is about ensuring that pupils develop confidence and mental fluency with whole numbers, counting and place value. Learning our numbers bonds is essential to help us become more fluent at applying our mathematics so we need to practise counting, adding and subtracting lots. We begin to solve problems and reason within 100. We have a test to complete at the end of KS1 but this doesn’t feel like a test to us and we always ensure children are confident and positive when we start.
Lower key stage 2 is about ensuring that pupils become increasingly fluent with whole numbers and the four operations, including number facts and the concept of place value. We do not learn to use strict written methods but instead we learn to manipulate the number system mentally to add, subtract, multiply and divide. By the end of year 4 we aim for all children to know their times table facts up to 12 x 12 so that they can apply this knowledge in Upper KS2. We use fun activities and games such as Times Table Rockstars to become fluent over time.
- Upper key stage 2 is where our pupils hone their skills and become confident users of mathematical concepts. Pupils extend their understanding of the number system and place value to include larger integers. This enables them to make connections between multiplication and division with fractions, decimals, percentages and ratio. We begin to learn trickier concepts but because we have a deep understanding of the number system up to this point and have developed real resilience, we can tackle problems of greater complexity. We ensure children are prepared to take the statutory end of year tests and supported in ways that meet the needs of all children.