Maths
Maths at Brierley School provides children with a foundation for understanding the world, the ability to reason mathematically, an appreciation of the power of number and a sense of enjoyment and curiosity about the subject. We encourage our children to be enthusiastic about maths, with a thirst for knowledge and resilience for challenge.
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Our maths curriculum is both creative and engaging for all pupils and endeavours to ensure all children achieve. We encourage children to develop the necessary skills to allow them to become ‘deep thinkers’ acquiring math skills to a range of practical, real life contexts to ensure their learning is both purposeful and meaningful.
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Our teaching sequence follows the White Rose Maths scheme of work. From this we have then created our own bespoke Brierley maths curriculum for each individual year group, ensuring pace and progression in all strands of learning across school. Alongside this, we use the NCETM Ready to Progress documents to help support the teaching of Maths and to develop resources, tasks and activities.
The Mastery approach to the teaching and learning of maths is applied in all lessons. We ensure that facts and methods are prioritised before teaching strategies to apply. It stems from the idea that all children can achieve in maths through support, challenge and the use of concrete, pictorial and abstract teaching methods. This approach has helped to improve outcomes and standards in each lesson. Each lesson offers the same starting point for all children and differentiation is achieved through the use of adult support, manipulatives and the use of progressive and open ended problems. We ensure that maths is taught in creative and engaging lessons, using a wide array of math manipulatives in concrete, pictorial and digital form. 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. Maths is widely promoted across the school and our classrooms have working walls that the children can utilise to support their learning through the use of vocabulary, models and images and methods.
Reasoning is a key area within our Maths teaching and is something teachers plan for carefully to ensure pupils are taught the correct methods in order to then reason. Problems are also well considered to reflect what the pupils already know. Throughout the year pupils are taught how to solve a wide range of reasoning problems to ensure that they are well equipped to problem solve with confidence. Mathematical vocabulary is an essential part of each lesson, we begin all lessons with a ‘Maths Chat’ activity where pupils are encouraged to describe, explain, convince, justify and prove using STEM sentences to answer in full. We hope to build problem solvers of the future and build resilience in our children; essential skills that they can use in all aspects of their learning.
Structure of a Brierley Maths lesson
Times Tables – explicit teaching of times tables supported through chants and games
Arithmetic - 5 questions linked to previous learning to ensure recap and consolidation
Math’s Chat - children are encouraged to describe, explain, convince, justify and prove using STEM sentences to answer in full.
Model and Teach to introduce new concepts (I do, we do, you do)- concrete, pictorial and abstract teaching. This input is given in small sections throughout the lesson.
Practice and Apply - children are given chance to apply their skills to problems and questions.
Reasoning – Reasoning questions are carefully chosen and are only taught when pupils have the knowledge and skills to solve them.
Challenge - all children are given the opportunity to reach the challenge activity within the lesson. This allows pupils to apply the skills learnt within different contexts.
Monitoring and Assessment in Maths
Formative assessment is ongoing throughout each lesson. It helps to judge progress and allows teachers to make flexible adaptions to their teaching in order to allow all pupils to achieve in each lesson. Effective formative assessment, daily marking within lessons and adult interaction, is firmly embedded into our approach to the teaching and learning of maths. All pupils are supported within the lesson to develop, progress and move their learning forward through questioning and feedback. Pupils demonstrate the impact this has on improving their learning through editing and response. The use of concise Curriculum Learning Goals ensures pupils are aware of what they are learning and supports the sequencing of lessons.
Summative assessment is carried out termly using Insight Tracker. Teachers use the bespoke Brierley curriculum to ensure pupils have met the key end points for each strand/unit of learning before moving on to the next strand of maths. Cross moderation occurs in school to ensure moderation is carried out correctly. Moderation throughout the collaboration also supports this.
Useful Websites and Apps for Parents
White Rose One Minute Maths app
TT Rockstars app
For the Maths National Curriculum, click on the link below to visit the Gov.uk website