Login


Maths

 
At St Bonaventure’s we follow the National Curriculum and believe that numeracy is essential for our children to progress in the future. We want every child to feel confident and fluent enough as mathematicians to contribute to engaging, varied and fun maths lessons, where they work together to explore links across the curriculum and apply their knowledge to new challenges. Each lesson or lesson block will cover fluency (secure knowledge and application of facts), reasoning (explaining the meaning behind maths concepts) and problem solving (using knowledge and skills in varied contexts).
 
Above all, we want all our children, teachers and families to know that maths is a creative and interesting pursuit, where there can be more than one way of looking at things; more than one strategy to solve a problem. Maths is not just about learning facts and getting an answer. Everyone at St Bon's is a mathematician.
 

Intent-

Our aim is for all children to feel positive about maths, have a healthy relationship with maths, and feel like they can contribute to lessons. They should all know that maths is more than just bookwork, getting it right and learning lists of techniques. Maths is creative; it is about discussion, explaining your thinking, trying things out, learning from mistakes, and applying it to real-world problems. Children should feel confident in expressing themselves, using mathematical language, and formulating their thinking into logically explained steps. Children should be able to explore, push boundaries, question, become aware of other areas outside the narrow confines of the curriculum. Teachers should be confident in allowing talk and activities outside their year group's core objectives, and be flexible in where their learning develops


Implementation-

At St Bonaventure’s we believe that all children achieve in maths, and where possible, the children’s maths learning will be linked to real life examples to help them to understand the relevance of maths in our world.

Reception to Year 6 use the White Rose Maths Hub schemes of learning as their medium-term planning documents. Appendix  --- shows the units taught for each year group, when planning for the term some units may be moved around to meet the needs of each class. Teachers will work with their partner teachers to plan and deliver lessons that suit the particular learning styles of the children within the year group. 

They will use their own judgement and formative assessment to ensure a flexible approach is adopted which recognises the pace of learning within the classroom. During the planning process, the small teaching steps will be planned for and broken down into lessons. The plans will include addressing misconceptions, anticipating language issues, key concept definitions, and representations in concrete, pictorial and abstract form.

There are regular whole school STEAM days where children have the opportunity to apply their skills to real life problem solving and understanding more about the world.


Impact-

We will engage and inspire all pupils through a curriculum that is tailored to them. Children will believe in themselves as mathematicians and are active participants in lessons. They have secure number knowledge appropriate to their year group. Children are able to use this knowledge with confidence to tackle, and solve, a range of problems. They use math resources, jottings and formulae to solve problems, and they determine which of these is best to use for the task set. 

The school has an Assessment and monitoring policy which provides an overview of the principles and structure.

 ● EYFS: Children are assessed continuously throughout the year against the Early Learning Goals. 

● Years 1, 3, 4 and 5 complete MARK assessments three times a year, based on their previous learning and the year group expectations covered so far; 

● Years 2 and 6 complete Mock SAT papers twice a year and then their government SAT paper once a year. based on all the end-of-Key Stage expectations

 
Our Calculation Policy
 
Parents often wonder about how we present mathematical ideas, and what the methods and representations the children know from school mean. They can often be very different from what we older people learned at school! 
 
We follow the White Rose scheme in our maths lessons, which give a consistent set of various representations and methods which emphasise understanding over rote learning methods without understanding. 
 
Here are two guides to how we teach the four operations, and how you can help at home. Please take the time to look through these:
How can I help my child with maths at home?
 
 
Every week all children will be given homework to help secure, practise or extend the knowledge and skills they have been learning in school. We encourage you to find a regular time for them to complete this work, free from distractions. Please let them have a go on their own first, and if they are getting stuck or frustrated try to help in a hands-off way at first by asking them to think of what they have been doing in school this week. If they still need help do feel free to explain the methods and concepts to them, and try to explain why as much as possible if you can.
 
Here are some sites with help for parents for maths, activity ideas, questions, games and explainer videos. Remember, every child has an Ed Shed login which includes Maths Shed!
Times Tables
 
All KS2 children work on their times tables every week. We have five levels from Bronze to Kryptonite which progress in difficulty and subject area, to prepare them for the arithmetic skills of KS2. We practise our tables using the school iPads with Mr Harrison's KS2 Times Tables app. 
 
The most important thing to know is that we practise not just standard times tables facts, but the corresponding division facts and fractions facts. When they get full marks in under five minutes, three times, they will earn their award certificate in Praise Assembly. We have examples of each of our Times Tables tests below.
STEAM Days
 
At St Bon's we believe that maths doesn't exist on its own – it is a creative tool which can help you work creatively in a huge range of subjects. Three times a year we hold STEAM Days (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Maths) where we challenge each year group to put their maths skills into practise to answer a problem linked to our topic. So far our STEAM Days have been about:
 
  • The Hidden Figures of the Apollo Program
  • How to Save the Environment
  • Mountains