Maths
Welcome to Maths at Norwood!
We would love to introduce you to our team.
Mrs J. Gilmartin (Year 3) - All the children in Mirs Gimartin's class know that maths is her favourite subject. In her previous career as a hotel manager she loved to work with budgets and forecasts. She feels it is a real privilege to bring that passion to Norwood and it's children.
Mrs M West (Year R) - As a young child Mrs West found maths hard, then she began training to become a teacher. Here, she learnt the importance of using concrete resources to support children's understanding. She is passionate to support children to have positive attitudes towards maths and this was fully fostered when working as maths lead teacher in Sefton.
Mr T. Walsh (Year 5) - loves the fact that there are so many ways to do maths. Without a doubt, there are faster, more efficient ways, but the thought processes can really differ to ultimately reach the same answer. He believes that because we constantly use maths every day in our daily lives, it is essential that children learn what an amazing subject it is. Maths has so much to offer as a subject and it is always exciting to be a mathmatician at Norwood.
Miss C Haworth (Year 2) - always found maths difficult as a child and because of this she was determined to create positivity when teaching the subject to her students. Each day, she wants to ensure that all children succeed and feel good about maths. In maths, it is a constant joy to see children's confidence blossom as they are taught to use concrete materials and a variety of methods to support and scaffold their thinking.
Intent
The National Curriculum (2014) for Maths aims to ensure that all children:
- Become fluent in the fundamentals of Mathematics
- Are able to reason mathematically
- Can solve problems by applying their Mathematics
At Norwood, these skills are embedded within Maths lessons and developed consistently over time. We are committed to ensuring that children are able to recognise the importance of Maths in the wider world and that they are also able to use their mathematical skills and knowledge confidently in their lives in a range of different contexts. At Norwood, we are passionate about arithmetic skills, which children regularly rehearse through our 4 a day sessions. We are constantly reviewing and enhancing our fluency knowledge through recall of mental strategies and number facts. We want all children to enjoy Mathematics and to experience success in the subject, with the ability to reason mathematically. We are committed to developing children’s curiosity about the subject, as well as an appreciation of the beauty and power of Mathematics.
Implementation
The content and principles underpinning the 2014 Mathematics curriculum and the Maths curriculum at Norwood reflect recent research and guidance. These principles and features characterise this approach and convey how our curriculum is implemented:
- Teachers reinforce an expectation that all children are capable of achieving high standards in Mathematics.
- The large majority of children progress through the curriculum content at the same pace.
- Differentiation is achieved by emphasising deep knowledge and through individual support and intervention.
- Teaching is underpinned by methodical curriculum design and supported by carefully crafted lessons and resources to foster deep conceptual and procedural knowledge.
- Practice and consolidation play a central role. Carefully designed variation within this builds fluency and understanding of underlying mathematical concepts.
- Teachers use precise questioning in class to test conceptual and procedural knowledge and assess children regularly to identify those requiring intervention, so that all children keep up.
To ensure whole school consistency and progression, Norwood uses the ‘White Rose’ scheme as a framework. It provides long term and medium term planning for all year groups. This is fully aligned with the school’s ongoing engagement with the DFE funded Maths Hubs programme and continues to ensure that staff at all levels understand the pedagogy of the approach that is, teaching for mastery. Teachers sequence lessons though mapped out small steps from the White Rose planning and use careful questions to draw out children’s discussions and their reasoning. The class teacher provides children with the knowledge and skills in lessons focussed on mathematical fluency before deepening their understanding through STEM sentences, reasoning tasks and problem solving. Mathematical topics are taught in blocks, to enable the achievement of ‘mastery’ over time. Each lesson phase provides the means to achieve greater depth, with more able children being offered more complex STEM sentences, rich and sophisticated problems, as well as exploratory, investigative tasks, within the lesson as appropriate.
Impact
The school has a supportive ethos and our approaches support the children in developing their collaborative and independent skills, as well as empathy and the need to recognise the achievement of others. Children can underperform in Mathematics because they think they cannot do it or are not naturally good at it. Our teaching approaches address these preconceptions by ensuring that all children experience challenge and success in Mathematics through developing a growth mindset. Regular and ongoing assessment informs teaching, as well as intervention, to support and enable the success of each child. These factors ensure that we are able to maintain high standards.
By the end of Upper Key Stage 2 (Year 6) children will:
- Extend their understanding of the number system and place value to include larger integers. This should develop the connections that pupils make between multiplication and division with fractions, decimals, percentages and ratio.
- Develop their ability to solve a wider range of problems, including increasingly complex properties of numbers and arithmetic, and problems demanding efficient written and mental methods of calculation.
- Be introduced to the language of algebra as a means for solving a variety of problems.
- Be able to classify shapes with increasingly complex geometric properties and that they learn the vocabulary they need to describe them
- Be fluent in written methods for all four operations, including long multiplication and division, and in working with fractions, decimals and percentages.
- Read, spell and pronounce mathematical vocabulary correctly. (Adapted from The National Curriculum in England, 2013).
Extra support with Timetables
Throughout the school, we are fully passionate about our children being fluent in their timestables. As a result, all children have access to the website Timetable Rock Stars (TTRS). More information about this can be found below. Nationally, the timetables are assessed through a test in Year 4. Please find information about this attached too.