Maths

At Smarden Primary School our goal is to create life-long mathematicians through establishing a learning environment in which all children can succeed. Our vision is for all pupils to become independent learners with lively enquiring minds, who enjoy and are confident users of maths. We feel mathematics is a fundamentally important and integral part of our everyday lives and therefore a key aspect of our children’s futures. 

In our school, we have adopted the Mathematics Mastery approach to teaching maths. Mathematics Mastery is an approach where children must achieve a level of mastery in prerequisite knowledge before moving forward to learn new skills, valuing depth over breadth. The core principles that underpin the programme are: conceptual understanding, communication and language and mathematical thinking. Together these three areas enable children to be successful in mathematical problem solving, which is central to the Mathematics Mastery curriculum. 

Within lessons, children will have opportunities to solve problems and represent different concepts by using concrete, pictorial and abstract approaches. They will have lots of opportunities to talk, explain and justify their mathematical thinking, as they are taught to organise, compare, look for patterns and generalise.

For an overview of the curriculum and unit narratives, please click here. 

The children will also participate in daily Maths Meetings, which are a vital part of the Mathematics Mastery programme. These sessions are fun and engaging, incorporating songs, rhymes and problems for the children to solve. They consolidate learning outside of the core maths lesson and provide a daily opportunity for children to practise applying their knowledge and skills, helping to continually build on their mastery of key concepts. Maths Meetings are used to consolidate, practise and revisit learning as required but they also provide an opportunity to secure and practise children’s number skills linked to our Arithmetic Curriculum.  

In addition to the Mathematics Mastery programme, we use Times Tables Rockstars to supplement our Arithmetic Curriculum. Times Tables Rockstars is an online, carefully sequenced, programme of daily times tables practise. At the core of Times Tables Rockstars (TTRS), is the belief that practising these key multiplication and division skills little and often has a great impact on fluency. The programme consists of times table games that encourage quick recall and include all members of the multiplication fact families. All children in years 1 - 6 are provided with a login and encouraged to access games weekly at home for their homework.

Furthermore, to support in-class learning pupils in Years 1-6 will also have access to Freckle to support with intervention and homework. This is a personal adaptive tool linked to STAR maths that is designed to support pupil learning.