Maths

At Pirbright Village Primary School we work hard to foster a love of Maths with every child being given the opportunity to succeed and thrive. We recognise that Maths is a huge part of everyday life therefore provide opportunities to apply our learning and skills in a variety of situations and experiences whilst developing a growth mindset. Building confident mathematicians who leave Primary School equipped with the ideas and knowledge needed to begin their secondary journey is just a small part of our puzzle!

From reception to year 6 we follow a mastery approach using the White Rose areas of learning. It is important to us to use a range of rich, high quality resources which provide children with the variation they need to flourish. Fluency, reasoning and problem solving underpin the Maths curriculum at Pirbright and through careful planning and delivery, children work hard to develop their understanding through a range of concrete, pictorial and abstract concepts. Where appropriate, we also encourage children to use the skills they learn in Maths lessons across the rest of the curriculum, whether it be using a bar chart to present scientific results or measures when baking as part of a DT project. We believe that as Maths is such an interconnected subject, we must support our children in being able to move fluently between representations of mathematical ideas.

Within lessons, we expect children to be working through the programmes of study at broadly the same pace, however, careful differentiation, support and scaffolding allow slower graspers more time and discussion of concepts in order to continue moving in line with their peers. For those children who show a greater understanding, our curriculum challenges them to delve deeper into an objective through rich and sophisticated language, problems and opportunities to explain and expand on their reasoning.

The National Curriculum reflects the importance of spoken language across the entire curriculum with Maths not being an exception. Our classrooms are filled with mathematical conversations between teachers and pupils which show modelled vocabulary and well thought out justifications. Once children are confident in discussing their thinking they begin to jot them down as part of their learning in their books.

Building fluency is something we really value at Pirbright and children have a range of opportunities in their lessons and home learning to build confidence and speed. Our ‘Magicians Guild’ number bond and times table challenges are a weekly appearance in our ‘Fluency Friday’ lessons and are very enjoyable for our children. Beginning a little way into Year 1, children work through the levels, applying learning from number and calculation areas of the curriculum.

Children have access to Mathletics as part of their home-learning and can work on age-related objectives set by their teacher.