Maths at Clarendon Junior School
At Clarendon Junior School, we intend for the children to become confident mathematicians who can use number facts and methods efficiently in real life situations.
To achieve this, we provide the children with opportunities 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. We aim for the children to 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. We provide opportunities for all children to reason mathematically by following a line of enquiry and to develop and present a justification, argument and proof using mathematical language. We intend for the children to 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.
Methods of Implementation:
At Clarendon Junior School, we follow the Mastery learning model as the basis to our approach to teaching Mathematics across the school. This means that through our Mathematical journey, within lessons and through units, we dedicate more time to go in to depth about a context, ensuring children understand how a concept works and why we use certain methods. As a guide to the order of units, we use the White Rose Scheme of Learning as a basis to enable children to build on their understanding unit by unit. However, this is not used as a scheme of work, just as guidance.
Our method of teaching Mathematics is to take learning at a measured pace that is dictated by the children within each class, ensuring no child is left behind as well as providing deeper and richer experiences for children who are grasping ideas quickly. We focus on the majority of children achieving what is expected of their age group and not going beyond this. Evidence shows that children need to be able to understand a concept, apply it in a range of situations and then be creative with it to really understand (or master) it. Simply going beyond the requirements of their age group does not guarantee they have fully understood something – just that they have heard it. Within lessons, there will not ‘obvious’ differentiation as children will work in mixed ability groupings to support each other and develop their understanding. Children will have the opportunity to access all of the stages of learning, when they are ready to move their learning on.
At our school, the majority of children will be taught the content from their year group only unless they are significantly far behind. They will spend time becoming true masters of content, applying and being creative with new knowledge in multiple ways.
Within each unit and concept taught, we use practical manipulatives with all children of all abilities to demonstrate the concept alongside the pictorial representations. This allows children to see how the mathematics works and notice patterns and similarities between different methods, thus strengthening their understanding and developing a range of different strategies to solve. Once confident with this, the learning will then lead to the introduction of the abstract written format with a range of variation questions to allow the children to experience the context in different formats using worded problems, diagrammatic representations and missing gap problems. Throughout all of the stages of our learning, the children are encouraged to explain their understanding and correct misconceptions using A.P.E format (answer it, prove it and explain it).
Previously, accelerating through the content led to some children having large gaps in their knowledge because the concept they had just learnt was either too big or learnt too quickly. As a primary school, it is our duty to ensure that children have an absolutely solid, concrete understanding of subject knowledge and skills as well as being emotionally resilient for the next year of their education.
We use lots of practical, pictorial and numerical representations to explore our learning in Maths.
Take a look at our 4 operations videos (follow the links on this page) to see how we solve our addition, subtraction, multiplication and division calculations physically, pictorially and numerically from Year 3 to Year 6.
We love to reason in every lesson and explain our understanding using A. P. E (Answer, Prove, Explain)!
