Maths at Beenham Primary School

Intent

At Beenham Primary School, we want our children to become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics, to be able to reason and to solve problems which they can apply and translate into the real world. Our curriculum embraces these National Curriculum aims, and provides guidance to help pupils to become.

Implementation

We have adopted the White Rose Maths Scheme, who have broken down each area of the National Curriculum into small steps. For each of these, they have created teaching slides and resources that our teachers adapt to the needs of their class and then use in lessons.

In addition to the White Rose materials, we may also use resources from Classroom Secrets or Twinkl, to both support and extend children within this subject. In order to support the children with their learning, we regularly use physical resources to ensure concepts are fully embedded. We use a range of manipulatives, including place value counters, base ten and multi-link cubes.

White Rose Maths provides guidance to help our children become:

Visualisers – we use the CPA approach to help pupils understand mathematics and to make connections between different representations.

Describers – we place great emphasis on mathematical language and questioning so pupils can discuss the mathematics they are doing, and so support them to take ideas further.

Experimenters – as well as being fluent mathematicians, we want pupils to love and learn more about mathematics.

To learn mathematics effectively, some things have to be learned before others, e.g. place value needs to be understood before working with addition and subtraction, addition needs to be learnt before looking at multiplication (as a model of repeated addition). White Rose put emphasis on number skills first, carefully ordered, throughout the primary curriculum. For some other topics, the order isn’t as crucial, e.g. Shapes and Statistics need to come after number, but don’t depend on each other. We try to mix these so pupils have as wide a variety of mathematical experiences as possible in each term and year.

As well as White Rose Maths, we also teach aspects of mathematics through the use of Flashback 4, Times Table Rockstars Jungle Maths and Pixl resources.