Maths

Maths is a skill that is built upon and used throughout the entirety of life.

Therefore, here at Holy Rosary we seek to empower every child to fulfil their potential and prepare them for their future. We offer a broad and enriching maths curriculum rooted in a balance between fluency, reasoning and problem solving.

We understand that the real world application of maths is vast beyond the classroom, reaching into everyone’s daily lives. As a result of this, we offer our pupils opportunities to apply their maths skills to real life scenarios – for example money week, shopping, budgeting, business enterprise week and cooking, to name but a few.

Pupils are required to explore maths in depth, using mathematical vocabulary to reason and explain their workings. We encourage our pupils to use a wide range of resources to show their workings in a concrete, pictorial and abstract form, proving and demonstrating understanding. We aim to ensure that the home school partnership is strong and as transparent as possible to all. This enables the parents an in depth understanding of the curriculum we offer, therefore enabling rich involvement.

Our aim is for all children to leave Holy Rosary with a sound mathematical mind, securely able to utilise reasoning skills and a mastery approach when faced with any problem. Using mistakes as learning opportunities to future success, empowering them to build resilience simultaneously. We want children to be fluent with numbers and have a secure understanding of timestables to be able to use these skills, which underpin all of mathematics.

Implementation 

We have created a culture where long term memory is at the forefront of what we do. One step in achieving this has been to develop a vocabulary rich environment, where talk for maths is a key learning tool for all pupils. Teaching key vocabulary is a driver for pupil understanding and develops the confidence of pupils to explain mathematically.

In KS1, daily number skills activities begin each maths lesson, focusing on elements such as number bonds, fluency in addition and subtraction and place value. Following this, children use PowerMaths books to access the curriculum, which is designed specifically with a mastery approach aligned to the White Rose schemes (based on the National Curriculum).

In KS2, the morning consists of Fluent in Five and Rapid Reasoning activities (taken from ThirdSpace Learning) followed by Timestables Rockstars. Following this, children use the White Rose scheme of learning combining fluency, reasoning and problem solving tasks in each unit.

We consistently model across the school each day, utilising various resources to build upon understanding.

Units are taught until the majority of the class are secure in their understanding of concepts. We have access to various high quality interventions, such as Numicon, which fill gaps in knowledge. Pre/post learning tasks are used across the school to track and highlight progress and misconceptions in units.