Mathematics
Intent
At the Newark Hill Academy, CHILD is at the heart of our enquiry based curriculum.
We challenge our pupils by giving our children the opportunity to develop their conceptual understanding through a range of practical, investigative and written work through the mastery maths approach including reasoning and problem-solving. We ensure we meet the need of all of our learners, including pupils with SEND.
Happiness and health is promoted by making their maths learning experiences enjoyable, motivating and exciting, and encourage all children to participate.
Our pupils will be inspired because maths is a discipline that allows us to examine so much of our world. Mathematics gives us a framework for thinking clearly, and proving to our self that we are thinking clearly.
Maths is everywhere, so through maths we encourage lifelong learning by ensuring that we provide a varied maths curriculum, offering learning in different way that develops crucial life-skills.
We celebrate diversity by acknowledging that everyone learns in different ways and recognising the need to develop pedagogies which enable all children to learn in ways which suits them.
Implementation
At Newark Hill Academy, we believe that Problem Solving is the heart of every Maths unit.
Our teachers ensure that mathematical skills are taught every day following our bespoke Maths Mastery Learning Journey approach. The phases in our Learning Journey ensures that we plan in a logical order to ensure that children develop a deep understanding of the mathematical concepts that are taught and able to make clear connections.
There is a clear focus when planning to include concrete model and images to support children’s understanding of number; teachers are encouraged to include practical lessons in their learning journey. We build on skills and understanding in a step by step and progressive way and continue to develop place value, the four number operations and the understanding of fractional parts.
Our children understand the importance of mathematics and how and why it may be used in real life context. Each unit is planned with an engaging context as a hook to engage the children which is linked to the Topic (cross curricular links). There are opportunities throughout the learning for the children to reflect on their learning; this is to encourage our children to be confident in numeracy so they can apply the skills that they learn to a variety of problems.
At Newark Hill Academy, we strongly believe in developing Mastery through whole class teaching. Lessons are planned using the ‘Differentiation by Depth’ strategy. In every lesson, all the children are given the opportunity to build on their knowledge, skills and understanding as they engage with problems at different depths. Teachers plan for Intelligent Practice- this type of practice supports children to build conceptual understanding, at the same time as developing procedural fluency. We believe this is the type of practice all pupils need to develop sustained mathematical learning.
Carefully structured questioning, combined with exercises that employ variation, provide children with the opportunity to practice calculation whilst, at the same time, encouraging the children to think about the relationships within the maths, thus deepening conceptual knowledge and helping them build mathematical connections. These questions probe the depth of pupils’ understanding, enabling all pupils to be challenged within the context of whole class teaching because we believe they can be answered at different levels of sophistication. All pupils benefit from such questions because they encourage pupils to engage with and understand concepts more deeply.
National Curriculum Mathematics Programmes of Study:
Click here to see so how mathematics is delivered in Year 1-6.
Click here to see our approach to Maths in Early years.
Below we have provided documents and videos explaining how we teach key concept.