Maths
Intent
Why do we teach this? Why do we teach it in the way we do?
Mathematics is an essential discipline that helps us to understand the world. At Woodlands, we strive for all children to develop a thirst and enthusiasm for learning mathematics. We aim to provide a broad and rich curriculum which promotes a love of learning, personal growth and development through a balance of skills and knowledge, ensuring coverage of the National Curriculum objectives for mathematics.
At Woodlands, building upon our core tenets of respect, resilience, empathy, self-awareness, passion for learning (botherdness), excellence, communication and teamwork, we strive to foster positive and resilient attitudes and promote the fact that everyone can do maths. We believe all children can achieve in mathematics, and teach for secure and deep understanding of mathematical concepts through small, meaningful steps. At our school, pupils will spend time mastering content and applying new knowledge in different contexts through the mastery approach we are developing, working with a DfE funded mastery project with a number of other schools involved (North West Maths Hub).
We hope to inspire children in their learning, and help them to learn and remember more so that they are confident with the skills and knowledge needed to continue their maths journey as they progress through Woodlands Primary and beyond.
At Woodlands, we aim for all pupils to:
- become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics so that they develop conceptual understanding and the ability to recall and apply knowledge rapidly and accurately.
- be able to solve problems by applying their mathematics to a variety of problems with increasing sophistication, including in unfamiliar contexts and to real-life scenarios
- reason mathematically by following a line of enquiry and developing an argument, justification, or proof using correct, stage-appropriate mathematical vocabulary
Implementation
What do we teach? What does this look like?
At Woodlands, we teach Maths across the school by following small steps of progression as guided by The White Rose scheme whilst covering the National Curriulum objectives. Fluency, Reasoning and Problem Solving are at the heart of the scheme that also follows a mastery approach which we are developing at our school. The White Rose scheme also uses the Concrete Pictorial Abstract (CPA) approach​ to support children's learning and progression. A concrete approach refers to the physical resources that children can manipulate to support their learning, examples include clocks, place value counters and bead strings. A pictorial approach refers to the visual models that can be used to support the understanding of methods and concepts. Finally, the abstract approach is the written method that the progression of skills and knowledge works towards; an example of this is the formal written method for addition. By embedding this approach, we are allowing pupils to spend enough time to fully explore a topic, reinforcing it with practise, before moving onto the next one. All ideas are built on previous knowledge and pupils have ample opportunity to develop relationships between topics.
Although we use the White Rose Scheme of learning, each class teacher has ownership of their yearly mathematical objectives, and for this reason timings may not always follow the long term plan (yearly overview) set by White Rose in order to meet the needs of all learners at Woodlands.
