Maths
what we say about maths at dean bank primary school
Riley – “I enjoy using the objects to help me find my answers.”
Libby – “I like the challenges and being able to use maths outside of school.”
Grace – “I like having answers to recall.”
our intent
At Dean Bank Primary School, our main aim is to strive to have children develop a positive attitude and interest towards mathematics. From the earliest years, we encourage children to ‘have a go,’ whilst supporting them to notice numbers, patterns, shapes, and connections and to be able to discuss their findings with others. We believe it is important to instill a love of learning from an early age and to teach children that we learn from making mistakes.
Proficiency in mathematical concepts and skills is vital for engaging successfully with the real world. We want to open children’s eyes to this and help them to see the importance of how what they learn in the classroom applies to the real world, both every day for everyone and more broadly across disciplines and careers. Beyond teaching maths discretely, we give children the opportunity to apply and develop what they have learnt across wider learning such as in science, geography and design and technology lessons, to support our intention that children see mathematical skills as something that is essential for their daily life.
We believe all children can achieve highly in maths. For some children, this demands a great deal of perseverance and resilience, and we talk explicitly about this in lessons and link it to other areas of curriculum learning, such as PSHCE. We encourage children to support one another to build a classroom climate of endeavour.
Year 4 Multiplication Tables Check (MTC)
At our school, we provide a maths curriculum that balances acquiring rapid fluency alongside opportunities to apply reasoning skills in various problem-solving contexts. Each classroom environment is set up to enable children to build independence in learning maths, from up-to-date working walls, carefully chosen scaffolds and accessible resources. The majority of children will be taught the content from their year group only in order that they make genuine progress and avoid gaps in their understanding that provide barriers to learning as they move through education. In mathematics this means ensuring a curriculum that is fully inclusive and aims for of all pupils to:
- become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics so that they develop conceptual understanding and the ability to recall and apply knowledge rapidly and accurately
- be able to solve problems by applying their mathematics to a variety of problems with increasing sophistication, including in unfamiliar contexts and to model real-life scenarios
- reason mathematically by following a line of enquiry and develop and present a justification, argument or proof using mathematical language
- have an appreciation of number and number operations, which enables mental calculations and written procedures to be performed efficiently, fluently and accurately to be successful in mathematics.
useful websites
long term plans
ks1
maths in action
working together
Children from Y4 have been teaching the Y2 pupils how to use Times Tables Rockstars to help them develop their confidence as they begin to learn the 2, 5 and 10 times tables. They all worked really well together and the older children were so supportive towards the younger ones. We’re looking forward to doing this again soon.
Year 4 problem solving
Children in Y4 have been working on their problem solving skills to develop strategies to help them find all possibilities. They worked well practically and used this to help them develop ways of recording this.
Year 4 active maths
Children in Y4 loved taking part in an active maths session to help them improve their knowledge of times tables. We’ve realised that many children need to do a lot of work to build up their confidence with times tables so fun activities like this will help them.
Year 2 partitioning maths
Y2 children have been using manipulatives to flexibly partition numbers to 100.
progression in place value
Place value is one of the most important areas of the primary maths curriculum so children in all year groups spend focused time on a variety of concepts related to this in order to underpin further learning in other areas of maths. The work shown in the photos highlights the range of skills taught and the progression across the school. Children use manipulatives and visual representations to develop their understanding in the early stages of maths and continue to use these where necessary to support and embed their learning.
Using concrete resources to compare objects and numbers in Y1.
Using pictorial representations to compare objects in Y2.
Identifying numbers to 1000 on number lines in Y3.
Flexible partitioning of numbers to 10,000 in Y4.
Rounding to the nearest 10,000 in Y5.
Reading and writing numbers to 10 million in Y6.
maths week england
As a school, we all celebrated Maths Week England which aims to show children how maths is about having fun with your brain, looking for patterns, spotting connections, making predictions and solving problems. All children took part in a variety of activities planned by their class teacher over the course of the week whilst those in KS2 also participated in the Times Tables Rockstars England Rocks tournament. Congratulations to Y5 for winning the tournament. They all put in a huge effort, especially Priya
Here is a selection of some of the activities that children enjoyed together:
As part of Maths Week England, Year 1 practised adding and subtracting within 10 as part of an interactive trail in which the children had to hunt outside for the answers. They read the number sentence and calculated the total. They worked together to find and identify the correct number/total before recording the total.
For maths week, Y3 did a maths scavenger hunt. We hid the clues around the room and the children were put into groups. They had a race in their groups to see who could crack the pirate code the fastest! Everyone had lots of fun.
Children in Year 4 worked together to complete the Three Cubes challenge. They also completed an interactive NRICH task which challenged the children to find the largest possible two-digit even number which uses the computer’s digit, and one of their own. As they completed this, they were asked to think about:
- How are you deciding which digit to choose?
- Can you describe a strategy that means your first ‘guess’ is always correct?