Maths at St. Anne’s Catholic Primary:

At St Anne’s Catholic Primary School, our Mathematics curriculum is designed to provide pupils with a strong, secure foundation in mathematical understanding from EYFS through to Year 6. We aim to develop confident, resilient and curious mathematicians who can reason, problem-solve and apply their knowledge to meaningful, real-world situations. Through a carefully sequenced curriculum, pupils build their understanding of number, calculation, geometry, measurement, fractions, statistics and mathematical relationships, revisiting key concepts regularly to deepen and secure their learning. From the early development of number sense in EYFS to the increasingly complex reasoning and problem-solving of Year 6, pupils are supported to make connections, explain their thinking and develop efficient strategies. Our curriculum nurtures a positive attitude towards mathematics, encouraging children to embrace challenge, learn from mistakes and recognise the value of mathematics in everyday life and beyond.

Implementation:

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. ICT is used widely across each year group to deliver the maths curriculum and to offer our pupils a range of exciting activities to challenge and inspire. 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. Here at St Anne’s we offer a wealth of enrichment activities to promote maths within our children’s lives including extra-curricular maths clubs and dedicated maths weeks in school. 

Structure of a Maths Lesson

The teachers have a flexible approach to the structure of their lesson so that they can reach the needs of an ambitious maths curriculum. However all maths lessons must have the following key elements:

1. Skills practice – warm up starter to build fluency skills

2. Hook – Intial problem

3. Modelling by the teacher then short bursts of guided tasks.

4. Independent activity to confirm understanding.

5. Plenary/mini review/deeper thinking question.

All lessons will cater for the individual needs of the children and to 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 every step. The initial problem is always linked to the lesson objective and is an introductory activity for pupils to explore independently and in groups or pairs. All children are expected to “have a go”.