Maths
Maths
At St John’s Highbury Vale Primary School we believe that mathematics equips pupils with a uniquely powerful set of tools, and develops an ability to calculate, reason and solve problems. It enables children to understand and appreciate relationships and patterns in both number and space in their everyday lives. We believe that maths should be purposeful and children are made aware of its importance in real-life contexts.
Maths
Maths
At St John’s Highbury Vale Primary School we believe that mathematics equips pupils with a uniquely powerful set of tools, and develops an ability to calculate, reason and solve problems. It enables children to understand and appreciate relationships and patterns in both number and space in their everyday lives. We believe that maths should be purposeful and children are made aware of its importance in real-life contexts.
The National Curriculum for mathematics aims to ensure that all children:
- Become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics, including through varied and frequent practice with increasingly complex problems over time, so that children have conceptual understanding and are able to recall and apply their knowledge rapidly and accurately
- Reason mathematically by following a line of enquiry, conjecturing relationships and generalisations, and developing an argument, justification or proof using mathematical language
- Can solve problems by applying their mathematics to a variety of routine and non-routine problems with increasing sophistication, including breaking down problems into a series of simpler steps and persevering in seeking solutions.
At St John’s, teachers from year 1 to year 6 are using detailed schemes of learning published by the White Rose Maths hub to plan effective maths lessons. Children are challenged through sophisticated questioning incorporating fluency, reasoning and problem solving with the aim to develop mastery of the subject.
Our approach to teaching and learning mathematics
At St John’s Highbury Vale Primary School we use White Rose Maths materials to plan and deliver high-quality mathematics lessons to our children. We are dedicated to enabling our children to achieve academic mastery in mathematics and we do so through the use of a Concrete – Pictorial – Abstract approach to learning mathematics. This enables our children to build solid foundations in their understanding of maths, which is vital in order to master the subject.
Concrete – All children have the opportunity to use concrete objects and manipulate them to help them understand and explain what they are doing.
Pictorial – children then build on this concrete approach by using pictorial representations, such as bar models and part-whole models. These can then be used to reason and solve problems.
Abstract – with the foundations firmly laid, children can move to an abstract approach using numbers and key concepts with confidence.