Intent 

At Slinfold, we believe that Maths is a crucial life skill that everyone deserves to feel confident to use in their daily life. The maths curriculum seeks to build disciplinary and substantive knowledge, sequencing progression through the school. This seeks to embed fluency through immersion and mastery approaches. Children are expected to reason in every maths lesson to embed mastery before moving on. 

We follow the White Rose Schemes of learning which supports the children on their journey to Maths Mastery. Mastering maths means children acquire a deep, long- term, secure and adaptable understanding of maths. We believe in a practical approach to teaching maths and follow a concrete, pictorial and abstract approach to support the children's learning.  Frequent assessment opportunities enable teachers to identify the children’s current knowledge and plan the next steps. We aim to develop confidence and positive attitudes towards maths and make links to real life situations to ensure the children understand the relevancy and importance of their learning. We aim to equip the children with a range of mental and written strategies to be able to solve problems and reason effectively. 

Children are encouraged to be independent learners, selecting the correct challenge for them. All children are encouraged to use resources such as base ten, number lines, Numicon, number rods and multiplication squares to help them access the learning and this can be further scaffolded by an adult when required.

We promote a love of learning, through our practical, mastery style lessons and consistently make cross-curricular links where appropriate and valuable.

SEND 

The best maths learning happens when learners can talk through their ideas with a teacher or a peer. Therefore, as teachers, we encourage discussion during lessons ensuring that all learners have the support they need to access these discussions, which could include scaffolding such as sentence frames, visual support and/or peer partners. These discussions are further enhanced by concrete resources, such as Numicon or counters, to support learning.

Here at Slinfold, we support all children in not only accessing but thriving in every subject. In maths these supports may include –

• The use of pre-teaching to give some learners confidence before facing a new concept in a whole class setting.
• Built in regular opportunities where all learning can experience success. E.g – starting with content in which they mastered in the previous lesson.
• Having clearly laid out worked examples for these learners to refer to when working independently (displayed on the working wall).
• Defining each new use of mathematical vocabulary (displayed on the working wall).
• If solving word problems, use an adult or confident peer to read the questions aloud to relieve the pressure of decoding the language.
• Using concrete resources to support learning – following a CPA approach.

The counting stick is a useful tool used to promote confidence and flexibility in children's counting skills but it is also brilliant when used to explore concepts such as:

• Position
• Order
• Calculation
• Measures

All of the children are familiar with the use of the counting stick to support their learning in class. Below, you will find some top tips and videos on how best to support your child's maths learning at home using a counting stick.

Times Tables

Counting sticks can be used to teach times tables. You can also improvise with household items to create a large counting stick to help teach your child their times tables. Watch this video for ideas on how to support your child to learn their times tables.