Intent
The intent of our mathematics curriculum is to design a curriculum, which is accessible to all and will maximise the development of every child’s ability and academic achievement. We want all children to enjoy mathematics and leave Delves Lane Primary School feeling that they can succeed in maths. We aim to deliver lessons that are creative and engaging. We want children to make rich connections across mathematical ideas to develop fluency, mathematical reasoning and competence in solving increasingly sophisticated problems. We intend for our pupils to be able to apply their mathematical knowledge to science and other subjects. We want them to know that it is essential to everyday life, critical to science, technology and engineering, and necessary for financial literacy and most forms of employment. As our pupils progress, we intend for our pupils to be able to understand the world, have the ability to reason mathematically, have an appreciation of the beauty and power of mathematics, and a sense of enjoyment and curiosity about the subject.
Aims of Mathematics at Delves Lane Primary School
The national curriculum for Mathematics aims to ensure that all pupils:
- become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics, including through varied and frequent practice with increasingly complex problems over time, so that pupils develop conceptual understanding and the ability to recall and apply 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.
Implementation
At Delves Lane Primary School we follow medium term plans closely linked to White Rose Maths in order to ensure that our children have full coverage of the Maths National Curriculum and to allow our children to develop a secure understanding of the objectives, especially in the key basic skills such as place value and number. We break objectives into ‘small steps’ to allow children to access new concepts and avoid common misconceptions. We use a wide range of materials, including Power Maths, to support the delivery of mathematics with the intent to develop a mastery curriculum within the school. We ensure all topics are revisited regularly through our daily ‘Starter of the Day’ to help knowledge become embedded in children’s long term memories. We also teach a daily 10 minute ‘Mastering Number’ lesson in EYFS and KS1 and basic skills lesson in KS2 to help children to learn and retain key facts such as number bonds, counting and times tables so that these skills do no prevent further learning in other areas of mathematics.
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.
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 aims to provide 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. Here at Delves Lane we offer a wealth of enrichment activities to promote maths within our children’s lives including extra-curricular Times Tables club and dedicated maths days in school.
Impact
By the end of KS2 we aim for children to be fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics with a conceptual understanding and the ability to recall and apply knowledge rapidly and accurately. They should have the skills to solve problems by applying their mathematics to a variety of situations with increasing sophistication, including in unfamiliar contexts and to model real-life scenarios. Children will be able to reason mathematically by following a line of enquiry and develop and present a justification, argument or proof using mathematical language.