Our Intent, Implementation and Impact

Intent

At Killamarsh Infant and Nursery School, we strive to make maths fun, purposeful and interesting for all children. We aim to equip all pupils with the skills and confidence to solve a range of problems through fluency with numbers and mathematical reasoning.  Children are encouraged to see the mathematics that surround them every day and enjoy developing vital life skills in this subject. We use White Rose to underpin our planning. We aim for every child to develop a sound understanding of maths, equipping them with the skills of calculation, reasoning and problem solving that they need in life beyond school. They will be given access to a variety of mathematical opportunities, which will enable them to make the connections in learning, develop and use new vocabulary and discuss their learning. By working across different representations of learning and using resources, we aim for our children to be confident mathematicians who are independent, inquisitive and not afraid to take risks.

The national curriculum for mathematics aims to ensure that all pupils:

• become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics, including through varied and frequent practice with increasingly complex problems over time, so that pupils develop conceptual understanding and the ability to recall and apply knowledge rapidly and accurately
• reason mathematically by following a line of enquiry, conjecturing relationships and generalisations, and developing 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

Implementation

Our curriculum incorporates the coverage of the statutory outcomes outlined in the Early Years Foundation Stage and KS1 Mathematics Programme of Study – National Curriculum 2014. Our planning is based on the White Rose Maths Schemes of Learning to guarantee consistency, coherence and progression throughout the EYFS and KS1. In addition staff refer to other materials to support short-term planning. These are used across EYFS and KS1 allowing children to be exposed to a variety of different types of learning and problems to solve. Teachers implement our schools’ agreed Calculation Policy of Concrete, Pictorial and Abstract (CPA). To learn mathematics effectively, some things have to be learned before others and this order of small step learning is factored into our planning (e.g. place value needs to be understood before working with addition). At Killamarsh Infant and Nursery School, we have an emphasis on number skills first, carefully ordered, throughout the curriculum. We support our children to become visualisers, describers and experimenters. Our pupils engage and enjoy using concrete resources to experiment and complete practical activities. We help our children to be visualisers through using the CPA approach. This helps pupils understand mathematics and to make connections between different representations. We encourage our pupils to become describers as we place a great emphasis on the mathematical language and questioning so pupils can discuss the mathematics they are doing. Sentence stems are regularly used during whole class discussions to support our younger children to learn mathematical language and develop their ability to reason. We support our children to become experimenters as we want pupils to love and learn more about mathematics.

Children take part in explicit daily mathematics lessons with a specific focus on either Number or Measure, Geometry or Statistics. All areas of the mathematics curriculum are continually revisited through planned short or longer in-depth teaching sequences to enable children to develop a depth of understanding. At Killamarsh Infant and Nurser School, we regularly give our children opportunities to use and apply their mathematical learning in everyday situations, aiming to embed mathematical skills across the curriculum.

Impact

The impact of our high-quality maths curriculum will be to develop children who are confident, keen and unafraid mathematicians who are equipped with a wealth of knowledge to draw upon to solve problems.
We measure how well we are doing by:

• Assessing our children’s outcomes against the ELGs for EYFS and the end of Key stage 1 expectations for Y1 and Y2.
• Monitoring the work children do and their response and attitudes to learning.
• Speaking with children so that they can demonstrate their developing skills and knowledge and show what they know, can do and to check they remember more than they did before.