“It is vital to lay secure foundations in early mathematics. We want young children to engage with numbers and to see how to use them in their everyday environment for labelling, quantifying and calculating: in other words, giving children the tools to help them to develop a better understanding of the world in which they live.”
Numbers and patterns: laying foundations in mathematics, DCSF, 2009.
How is maths taught at Mousehold?
At Mousehold, we want all children to experience success in and enjoy Mathematics. Our intent is to provide a high-quality maths education to ensure our children are able to make rich connections across mathematical ideas to develop fluency, mathematical reasoning and can use these skills to solve problems. At Mousehold, these skills are embedded within Maths lessons and developed consistently over time where resources are available to help children learn, develop and apply the understanding using the CPA approach to Maths. We are committed to giving children a love of maths by developing children’s curiosity about the subject so they will be able to recognise the importance of Maths in the wider world and be able to use their mathematical skills and knowledge confidently in a range of different contexts.
Following the Mastery approach we;
- Enable all children to master concepts during whole class participation
- Spend time developing deep understanding of the key ideas that are needed to underpin future learning.
- Give children the vocabulary to articulate their understanding by saying how and why they know what they know.
Using the CPA (Concrete, Pictorial, Abstract) approach, children can explore new learning with concrete representations using manipulatives such as counters and numicon. Children can make and understand pictorial representations and apply these in their maths work. We use the White Rose maths Schemes of learning which follows the Mastery Approach. The scheme supports teachers in ‘digging deeper’ and aims to helps children achieve true ‘Mastery’ of maths. We are adapting the scheme for our school to meet the needs of all learners, including challenging those children who are working at Greater Depth Standard.
