Maths: Everyone Can!

At Monkhouse, we love maths and we believe that everyone can succeed!
Our carefully planned, progressive maths curriculum is designed to spark curiosity, build confidence, and ensure every child enjoys learning. Children are taught by highly trained specialists who follow the Maths Mastery approach, helping them develop deep understanding through exploration and reasoning. We believe in social justice - every child deserves full access to the maths curriculum and the opportunity to thrive.

What maths looks like at Monkhouse.

Our curriculum follows a concrete pictorial-abstract approach to achieve mastery and depth for all children. With an emphasis on problem solving, children are taught to visualise, to make connections and to communicate their understanding both verbally and in written form. Units are taught in extended blocks in order to allow sufficient time for children to practise, refine and ultimately master concepts and processes. They are carefully sequenced so that skills and knowledge are continually revisited and applied through procedural and conceptual variation.

Lessons are designed to ensure all children access rich, problem solving tasks and do not just focus on development of procedural fluency. Lessons are designed to follow an episodic teaching approach where all children start with a concept and have teacher input and modelling throughout the lesson. Teachers use assessment for learning to determine where within the lesson children need further guided practise or independent practise. Through this approach, no child is given a predetermined label based on prior attainment and all children’s needs are met.

Aspirations

In maths we firmly believe that all children should access all areas of our maths curriculum. They should learn together and be able to explore all areas of maths in different ways; they all get the opportunity to use their learning and deepen their understanding through reasoning and problem solving in lessons. This is epitomised in our strapline:

Maths: Everyone can!

Mastering Number 

Each day, our children in reception, year 1 and 2 take part in a mastering number session. This is a session designed to allow children to use various methods to become fluent in the composition of numbers and in subitising (knowing an amount without counting). We had a session where parents joined children for a session to see what a session is like and to help with home learning. We have started a 5 week program of mastering number @ home in these year groups to help support these key areas. 

Mastering Number is provided by NCETM and the below link will give more information.

https://www.ncetm.org.uk/maths-hubs-projects/mastering-number/