Maths

Intent:

At Poulner Infant School & Nursery, we want our children to know that Mathematics is a creative and highly inter-connected discipline. It is essential to everyday life and as such we aim to deliver a high-quality mathematics education. This provides a foundation for understanding the world, the ability to reason mathematically, an appreciation of the beauty and power of mathematics, and a sense of enjoyment and curiosity about the subject by accessing learning within personal ability using concrete, pictorial or abstract resources. Throughout the delivery of our Mathematics curriculum we aim to link it to the idea that mathematical ability is not something that is fixed, but that develops over time with practice. 

Implementation:

We design, review and adapt tasks to meet the needs of all the children. These tasks are linked to the national curriculum and HAM model and as such they will be linked to the following outcomes:

At Key Stage 1: children will develop confidence and mental fluency with whole numbers, counting and place value. This will involve working with numerals, words and the four operations, including with practical resources [for example, concrete objects and measuring tools]. At this stage, children will develop their ability to recognise, describe, draw, compare and sort different shapes and use the related vocabulary. Children will also begin to use a range of measures to describe and compare different quantities such as length, mass, capacity/volume, time and money.

The expectation is that the majority of children will move through the programmes of study at broadly the same pace. However, decisions about when to progress should always be based on the security of children's understanding and their readiness to progress to the next stage. Children who grasp concepts rapidly will be challenged through being offered rich and sophisticated problems before any acceleration through new content. Those who are not sufficiently fluent with earlier material will be given the opportunity to consolidate their understanding, including through additional practice and interventions, before moving on.

The children will be assessed regularly giving teachers a strong understanding of their current knowledge and understanding, but also highlighting any future needs.

Impact:

The overall impact of our curriculum should result in pupils who:

• are fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics, due to varied and frequent practice with increasingly complex problems over time, and who have developed conceptual understanding and the ability to recall and apply knowledge rapidly and accurately.
• can reason mathematically by following a line of enquiry and who can develop an argument, justification or proof using mathematical language
• can 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.
• can understand that Mathematics is an interconnected subject in which they can move fluently between different representations of mathematical ideas. For example, they should be able to apply their mathematical knowledge to science and other subjects.