Maths
Intent
At Chigwell Row infants school, we aim for our children to explore maths through practical activities and we recognise the importance of children being able to make their own connections through exploration and discussion.
Our Maths curriculum ensures every child works towards a common goal of fluency in the fundamentals of mathematics, with strong reasoning skills and the ability to not only solve problems but find satisfaction and enjoyment in problem solving, providing every child with a sense of achievement and appreciation of the beauty of maths. Our Maths curriculum provides opportunities for children to work together in sharing their reasoning, and not only supporting but also challenging each other’s justifications in a productive manner.
Our mastery approach to the teaching of Maths ensures all children, regardless of ability, are able to celebrate their successes. Our Maths curriculum enables children to build confidence, resilience, curiosity and enthusiasm towards the subject. It encourages children to move fluently between their skills, and to understand the importance of mathematics in everyday life.
Implementation
In Early Years we follow power maths which is taught 5 days a week. The teacher provides a short input and the children then complete a practical activity in groups or pairs.
The Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum feeds into the National Curriculum. It is good practice to make use of cross curricular links to enable children to use their learning in a real-life context. Pupils are given opportunities throughout their classroom provision to use and apply the mathematical skills and concepts they have learned.
At Chigwell Row, we teach daily Mathematics in Key stage 1 these lessons are around 1 hour long. We teach using the Power maths scheme. Children record their work in the power maths practice books any work completed to support, challenge or further develop their learning is recorded in their maths journals.
We teach a mastery curriculum where we aim for children to master the key areas and domains in Mathematics. The expectation is that the majority of pupils will move through the programmes of study at broadly the same pace. However, decisions about when to progress will always be based on the security of pupils’ understanding and their readiness to progress to the next stage. Pupils who grasp concepts rapidly will be challenged to deepen their understanding by being offered rich and sophisticated problems and not accelerate through to new content. We teach using the concrete, pictorial and abstract approach:
Concrete – students will have the opportunity to use concrete objects and manipulatives to help them understand what they are doing.
Pictorial – students will then build on this concrete approach by using pictorial representations. These representations can then be used to reason and solve problems.
Abstract – with the foundations firmly laid, students should be able to move to an abstract approach using numbers and key concepts with confidence.
All classrooms have concrete resources that are used in the teaching of mathematics, and this is strongly encouraged at all ages and abilities.
During our daily lessons we encourage children to count aloud, practice fluency, problem solving and reasoning skills and ask mathematical questions. They have the opportunity to independently access and use a range of resources to support their work. We develop the children’s ability to represent problems using visualisation skills, including jottings and pictorial representations.
All classrooms have a display area specifically for Mathematics. This is called a working wall and displays items that children need to support and develop the unit's learning. For example, key vocabulary, models and key questions. In the Early Years’ Foundation Stage there are also specific mathematical areas for children to access in their everyday learning.
We measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods
Assessing children’s understanding of topic linked vocabulary before and after the unit is taught.
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- End of unit assessments -Year 1 and 2
- Termly assessments and data meetings where children’s progress is monitored.
- Summative assessment of pupil discussions about their learning.
- Images and videos of the children’s practical learning.
- Interviewing the pupils about their learning (pupil voice).
- Moderation staff meetings where pupil’s books are reviewed and there is the opportunity for a dialogue between teachers to understand their class’s work.
- Marking of written work in books