Maths

Subject Leader: Mrs Mortimer

I love teaching maths - it's my favourite subject along with French. I really love how all areas of Maths link together, like one great big jigsaw. No matter how difficult something may appear there is always a solution, so remember to never give up!

Maths is all around us in ways we don’t stop to think about. Just take a normal morning. You need to be able to tell the time to set an alarm and wake up. Then you need to be able to calculate time duration so you know what time to set your morning alarm so you have enough time to do everything you need to do before leaving the house. You need to understand number to tell the time, ratio to work our how much milk to put with your cornflakes, prepositions to understand mum and dads instructions in getting dresses, position and direction for finding your way to school and all this is before you have left the house! Maths is everywhere, from cooking, to planning days out, playing your favourite games and knowing how long you have left before your favorite television show comes on. Maths is the foundation for everything in life and during your time at St Wilfrid's the whole St Wilfrid's family will do everything we possibly can to help you understand and enjoy maths making sure you have the secure foundations to build upon through life.

Our Vision

At St Wilfrid’s Maths is a fundamental lifelong skill that everyone needs to live a day to day life. Maths is one of the first skills we use when we wake up, looking to see what the time is and working out the ratio of milk to our cereal. Without realising it, maths forms the basis of nearly every decision we make and we want all of our children to leave school with the firm foundations in maths and a can do attitude that nothing is unachievable. We believe in making maths fun and showing children the links to the wider world. We follow a mastery maths curriculum so that all children can achieve a positive working knowledge of maths in every aspect. We strongly believe that children need providing with a deep understanding of the subject through a concrete, pictorial and abstract approach. This ensures pupils fully understand what they are learning.

Maths provides children with powerful ways to describe and investigate an ever-changing world. We want all children to experience a sense of awe and wonder as they solve a problem for the first time and that keep that excitement, determination and sense of achievement as they progress with their journey in maths for their entire lives.

Intent

We value a maths curriculum that is creative and engaging. All children to have access to this curriculum and to make progress in lessons. Our children need to develop the necessary skills to make them “deep thinkers” acquiring maths skills that can be recalled quickly andtransferred and applied in different contexts. They need to be able to make rich connections across the areas of maths and use their knowledge in other subjects. Maths is the foundation for understanding the world and we want our children to know the purpose behind their learning and to apply their knowledge to their everyday lives.

Implementation

Here are St Wilfrid’s we use Power Maths to teach maths using a mastery approach. This ensures that our children have full coverage of the Maths National Curriculum and to allow our children to revisit topics several times over the year allowing their knowledge to embed. All children are catered for within the maths lessons ensuring that the teacher offers the necessary support and challenge for each individual to make progress. We ensure that maths is taught in creative and engaging lessons using a wide array of maths manipulatives to aid and support our children in their learning.
We aim to encourage the deepest of learning for our children so that their knowledge can be transferred and applied in many contexts including other subjects e.g. science and art and their everyday lives. Maths is widely promoted across the school and our classrooms have working walls that the children can utilise to support their learning and provide extra challenge.
Our aim is to ensure that the three core areas of the national curriculum are covered in all our lessons: fluency, reasoning and problem solving. We offer the children the opportunity to have varied and frequent practice of their maths skills with the focus on their ability to recall and apply their knowledge rapidly and accurately. Reasoning is a key area in all our lessons as our children need to be able to: Describe, explain, convince, justify and prove to
be successful in this subject. Mathematical vocabulary is an essential part of each lesson and the children need to understand this within the area they are studying and be able to make rich connections across other areas within this subject. Each lesson provides children with the opportunity to reason through their ideas, use their mathematical language to explore a line of enquiry and problem solve routine and non-routine problems.
We hope to build problem-solvers of the future and build resilience in our children; essential skills they can use in all aspects of their learning.

Impact

All lessons at St Wilfrid’s include some element of reasoning and problem solving. Questioning is a key part of the maths lesson – letting the children demonstrate what they know and challenging them at every step. Our assessment practice ensures that each lesson and all assessments allow teachers to recognise misunderstandings and areas of subject knowledge need. By recognising
individual needs teachers are able to build confidence and courage within the classroom.

Calculation Policies

Below are links to our calculation policies which will allow you to see how the four operations are taught at St Wilfrid's.

In addition to the policies, there are one-page reference sheets which model the calculation methods for Y2-Y6. Please use these when helping your children at home with their maths homework. If you have any questions about calculation methods, please don't hesitate to speak to a member of staff.

Resources from 2023-24 Parent workshops.

Please find the resources from our November 2023 workshop on 'What Maths Looks Like At St Wilfrid's' below.

Further workshops to be arranged for Spring 2024 - written calculation methods.

Resources to support your children at home

At St Wilfrid’s we use Power Maths alongside other resources. Below is a link to a variety of videos produced by White Rose Maths to help support parents with the modern teaching methods. Episodes include an introduction to place value, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions and algebra. As always if we can help you to support your child please don’t hesitate to speak to a staff member.

https://whiterosemaths.com/for-parents/maths-with-michael/

White Rose 1 minute Maths App is free to download. Your child can practise subitising, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. It is easy and great fun to use.

1-Minute Maths App | White Rose Maths

Useful websites

Take a look at the video below if you'd like to learn/practise long multiplication.