Ensuring FUN, PURPOSE, Fluency & MASTERY IN MATHS

At WJS, we want children to be efficient and confident mathematicians when they leave us having acquired, developed and retained the mathematical fluency required to be a successful adult. Our intent is to provide a secure understanding through a mastery approach to maths. This involves fostering a deep understanding of mathematical concepts, promoting a love for the subject, and ensuring that pupils develop fluency in mathematical procedures.

We aim to install a growth mindset in pupils, encouraging them to embrace challenges and view mistakes as opportunities for learning. The curriculum is sequenced logically, with clear progression in learning objectives that build upon prior knowledge and are broken into small and manageable steps to help the children build and retain their understanding for life. Additionally, we seek to provide opportunities for pupils to apply their mathematical knowledge to solve real-world problems and foster a deep appreciation for the relevance of Maths in everyday life.

Our maths teaching and learning is based on a Mastery approach that follows the White Rose Maths scheme and is supported when appropriate by Power Maths to embed subject knowledge and scaffold learning across all year groups and abilities. Through our teaching of Mastery, we are developing the '5 big ideas' from NCTEM and the Maths Hub into our learning to assist children in deepening their own understanding and make the links across all areas of the maths curriculum to further support their fluency and mastery.

In order for everyone to develop mastery in maths, we ensure that we teach the key concepts in a variety of different ways, such as: using resources and manipulatives (E.g. numicon, counting beads or Cuisenaire) that support children's conceptual understanding, through taking the learning outside to help embed their learning, through hands-on investigation or through practising the concepts through a variety of different presentations.

We also use a drip-fed approach to teaching the key arithmetic skills by ensuring the children practice these skills regularly so that the knowledge is reinforced and eventually retained. Teachers regularly use a variety of retention strategies: low-stake quizzes, note-taking, knowledge organisers, questions of the day, working walls, unit assessments, photos and key vocabulary to help support our children's knowledge and understanding

Times Tables are a fundamental element to becoming a fluent mathematician, so we encourage the daily practice of these facts, through fun and inspiring games and activities such as 'TTRockstars' which is celebrated every Friday when we share as a school which class is the most accurate, or has answered the most questions in a specific time.