Maths

Maths: Everyone Can!

We love maths at Monkhouse! We are proud of our maths curriculum and our approach to teaching it, so much, our mantra in maths is - Maths: Everyone can. We provide a broad, balanced and progressive maths curriculum which is integrated into other areas of the curriculum where appropriate. We aim to ignite a passion for learning and exploring and give all children the opportunity to succeed. Our philosophy in maths is centred around the notion of social justice and that all children are entitled to have access to the whole maths curriculum.

We teach according to Singapore Maths principles and pedagogy, using 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.

What Maths looks like in our school

Maths is practical and varied; no lesson is the same! Maths takes the form of maths lessons, HI5 and arithmetic sessions. One thing that is in every maths session is talk! Children are given the opportunity to explore and reason in their maths. Our maths policy and calculation policies are specifically designed to encourage this. We use manipulatives to show the concept of the maths the children are learning. 

Click to see videos that our children have made which show the stages to our calculation policy, how we approach different concepts through representations and some of the manipulatives we use.

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/