Our aim for Maths at Southern Road Primary is to ensure that our teaching and learning:
- Supports a mastery approach of the curriculum
- Effectively delivers all three areas of the curriculum: fluency, problem solving and reasoning
- Meets all of the national curriculum objectives
- Allows all pupils to make progress throughout their mathematical learning journey
- Is consistent across the school
With all this, and the consistent focus on growth mindset at Southern Road, we aim to ensure that all children are able to meet their potential in Mathematics and that they develop a real enjoyment of the subject. As mentioned above, our Mathematics curriculum (shaped by the requirements of the National Curriculum) is further broken down into the following key areas:
Fluency:
Children are given the opportunity to solidify their understanding of key Mathematical concepts as they progress from the concrete to the abstract at the beginning of each PPA cycle. Pupils have the benefit of a wide range of resources to support this shift and ensure that they have secure conceptual understanding before moving to more abstract ideas. Furthermore, pupils will often revisit key concepts in the form of fluency starters to keep their conceptual understanding “on the boil”.
Reasoning:
Once pupils are secure in their conceptual understanding in a PPA cycle, they will have the opportunity to apply this understanding to reasoning questions. Strategies for tackling reasoning questions are explicitly taught to support children who find this more challenging, allow all children to progress in this area.
Problem Solving:
Once a PPA cycle children have the opportunity to solve a stand-alone problem unrelated to their current area of focus. Problem Solving lessons instead have a Problem Solving related objective (trial and improvement; working systematically; finding all possibilities; identifying patterns; finding and describing rules; visualising and reasoning logically) which increase in sophistication as they progress through the school.
As can be seen here, these three aspects feed into one another to create a complete and rewarding Maths curriculum.
At Southern Road Primary School our vision for the teaching and learning of Mathematics is to have the following desired impact:
- Pupils will approach mathematics with a growth mindset demonstrating resilience and passion, enabling them to reach a mastery level in all their mathematics objectives throughout their learning lives.
- Pupils will have a foundation for understanding the world, an appreciation of the beauty and power of mathematics and a sense of enjoyment and curiosity about the subject.
- Pupils will be fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics, including through varied and frequent practise with increasingly complex problems over time. This will allow pupils to develop conceptual understanding and the ability to recall and apply knowledge rapidly and accurately.
- Pupils will be able to reason mathematically by following a line of enquiry; conjecturing relationships and generalisations; developing arguments, justifications and proofs using mathematical language.
- Pupils will be able to 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 when seeking solutions.