Maths

Our vision

Mathematics is an important creative discipline that helps us to understand and change the world. We want all pupils at Castle Primary to experience the beauty, power and enjoyment of mathematics and develop a sense of curiosity about the subject.

We foster positive ‘can do’ attitudes, believe all children can achieve in mathematics, and teach for secure and deep understanding of mathematical concepts. We use mistakes and misconceptions as an essential part of learning and provide challenge through rich and sophisticated problems before acceleration through latest content.

Curriculum intent

We want our children at Castle 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.
• Solve problems by applying their mathematics to a variety of problems with increasing sophistication, including in unfamiliar contexts and to model real-life scenarios.
• Have an appreciation of number and number operations, which enables mental calculations and written procedures to be performed efficiently, fluently, and accurately. Solid of understanding of number is key and we put numbers first. Placing a high emphasis on number competency is the first step to success in mathematics.
• To become experimenters. As well as being fluent mathematicians, we want pupils to love and learn more about mathematics.

Curriculum implementation

At Castle we follow the White Rose units of work to structure the learning across the year groups, ensuring learning is carefully scaffolded and built upon to enhance current understanding.

Units of learning are broken down into manageable small steps which allows teachers to ascertain the children’s current understanding within a unit. We place an emphasis on depth before breadth: reinforcing knowledge repeatedly to ensure children are competent and retrieval is quick.

We encourage collaboration so as children progress through the units as a group, they are supporting each other as they learn.

Research shows that when children are introduced to a new concept, working with concrete physical resources and pictorial representations leads to a better understanding of abstract concepts. Therefore, our lessons take on a concrete, pictorial, abstract (CPA) approach. This deepens pupils mathematical understand and helps to make connections between different representations, leading into more secure knowledge of abstract concepts.

We place great emphasis on mathematical language and questioning so all pupils can discuss the mathematics they are doing, and so support them in taking their ideas and explanations further. Children are supported by sentence stems provided by the teacher, so every child has a starting point with their verbalising.

Our daily lessons

Our lessons follow an episodic teaching model where teaching and learning happen in manageable episodes to ensure children can process new learning at a pace where all learners can achieve.

We believe that teachers should use their teacher judgement, knowledge and expertise about their pupils to design the learning sequence most suitable for them. Therefore, lesson structure is flexible to meet the needs of learners. It is imperative however that each session contains key elements to instil a deeper understanding of new mathematical concepts.

Throughout our lessons you will see;

• Small steps in learning
• CPA approach
• Assessment for learning
• Opportunities for talk
• Adaptive teaching (to enable or extend all learners)

Each lesson will have a strong emphasis on retrieval of past learning, fluency, application of new learning and reasoning and problem solving. All of which are the vital elements to becoming competent mathematicians.

In addition to the new small step of learning, children will have separate Maths on Track (MOT) sessions throughout the week.

During these MOT sessions children will work on;

• Immediate intervention from previous small step if a misconception arises.
• Deliberate practise of weaker area of maths identified by assessments of a previous step.
• In KS1 children will secure firm foundations in the development number through the NCETM Number Sense programme. Children build on fluency in calculation and a confidence and flexibility with number.
• In KS2 children will secure firm foundation and develop fluency in multiplication and division facts through the NCETM Number Sense programme. They build confidence and flexibility with number that exemplifies secure times table knowledge.
• In KS2, daily times table practice through focused timetable teaching or deliberate practice of times tables using Times Table Rock Stars.