At Holy Trinity C of E Primary School, we want pupils to leave Year 6 as confident mathematicians who see the subject as exciting and relevant.  We use the mastery approach to maths, which opens up opportunities for pupils to excel in this subject. A high-quality mathematics education can open up a greater understanding of the world around us and it teaches us valuable problem solving skills that can be applied right across the curriculum. Pupils also become more aware of how they learn through metacognitive approaches that encourage them to plan, monitor and reviews the different steps in their reasoning.

We want all our students to:

• Develop fluency in the fundamentals of mathematics, applying the skills and operations they have learnt to problems of increasing complexity over time.  They should be able to recall and apply knowledge rapidly and accurately.
• Reason mathematically by following a line of enquiry, convince their teachers of their understanding through talking about their learning and their processes, justifying their thinking using mathematical language and apparatus.
• 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.

Teachers plan engaging and exciting lessons ensuring that there are regular opportunities for hands on learning that use effective resources and manipulatives to embed new concepts.  All teachers embed the CPA approach in their planning– concrete, pictorial and abstract. This ensures  pupils have the opportunity to use practical resources and visual representations to develop a secure understanding of concepts, which allows them to then move on to the abstract. We use ‘White Rose Maths’ for our long term planning, adapting this and responding to the needs of our learners in our short term planning.  All classes have a one hour lesson daily, with appropriate starter and plenary activities which reinforce key ideas and develop the recall of key facts and mental mathematics.

Mathematics is organised into the following areas; number and place value, addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, fractions and decimals, measurement, geometry and statistics. Pupils have opportunities to apply their understanding in other areas of the curriculum and to solve increasingly sophisticated problems.

In Key Stage 2 (Years 3 to 6) all pupils learn to follow a standard procedure for the four operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division). Details of these can be found in our Mathematics Policy and Calculation Policies.

Supporting your child with Mathematics

There are many ways you can help your child at home to reinforce their learning from class. Essential elements of Mathematics are:

• Quick recall of multiplication facts (depending on year group expectations). Below are a list of online multiplication games and other online maths resources that your child will enjoy playing.
• Quick recall of number bonds to 20 (by end of year 3). The importance of these cannot be underestimated or over emphasised as they are transferrable to addition and subtraction and other maths calculations.

If you have any questions regarding supporting your child with Mathematics, please do not hesitate to contact Mr Dale via the school office.

Please watch the videos below to see how we begin to teach maths.