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