Mathematics at St. Margaret's Infants
Mathematics is a creative and highly inter-connected discipline that has been developed over centuries, providing the solution to some of history’s most intriguing problems. It is essential to everyday life, critical to science, technology and engineering. A high-quality mathematics education therefore provides a foundation for understanding the world, the ability to reason mathematically, an appreciation of the beauty and power of mathematics, and a sense of enjoyment and curiosity about the subject. We rigorously follow the requirements of the National Curriculum, whilst providing a variety of learning experiences with practical resources to enable children to become secure in their understanding of mathematical concepts. We strive to enable our learners to be able to talk with confidence about their maths, explaining and reasoning their mathematical thinking.
We use a mastery approach to our maths learning, which means that all of our pupils are taught key concepts around their maths learning and then bed them into their deeper understanding. We work alongside our local Maths Hub partners to develop our practice and skills to ensure that our maths teaching and learning is focused and develops children's long term understanding and recall.
We use the White Rose (https://whiterosemaths.com/) sequence of learning to support maths in school but this is just the starting point - from here we personalise our pupils' learning and always try to ensure that maths includes the 5 Key concepts for mastery in maths;
Representation and Structure, Variation, Mathematical Thinking, Fluency and Coherence.
We aim to develop a positive, can-do approach to maths with regular opportunities for children to apply their skills to problem solving activities. This positivity was recently summed up by one of our Year 2 pupils who said, “It’s not that the maths is getting easier, it’s that I am getting better at it!”
Useful Maths links to support maths learning at home:
https://whiterosemaths.com/resources/1-minute-maths
https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/shows/numberblocks
https://play.numbots.com/#/account/school-login/107594