Maths
At Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Primary School & Nursery we aim to promote a love and enjoyment of mathematics which we believe is essential to everyday life and future employment. High-quality mathematics education provides the essential building blocks for understanding the world we live in as it constantly evolves and changes around us.
To achieve this, we ensure that the Teaching for Mastery approach (coherence, variation, mathematical thinking, careful use of representations and structures) is fully embedded in our maths teaching. Our maths curriculum provides children with the opportunity to master mathematical concepts through carefully sequenced, interactive maths lessons.
How we teach Maths
Our lessons are broken down into small sequenced learning steps that gradually expose the mathematical concept; ensuring learning is accessible to all children. A key learning generalisation is then carefully exposed and created with the children as they apply the learning to a range of different contexts. We use varied concrete, pictorial and abstract representations alongside each other to carefully expose the mathematical structure and ensure our children can move flexibly between different representations and mathematical ideas. Each lesson will provide opportunities for the children to reason and solve mathematical problems. To extend learning, we provide greater depth challenges, which are used to deepen knowledge whilst often making links to other areas of the curriculum.
Daily Fluency Sessions and Home Learning
In addition to our maths lessons, our students spend 15 minutes a day recalling, rehearsing and securing key additive and multiplicative facts in a discrete fluency session. Developing fluency skills in this way reduces the cognitive overload during the main maths lesson, helping all children to understand new concepts. The school uses the programme Times Tables Rock Stars in order to encourage fluency with multiplicative facts and students have access to Maths Frame to continue their learning at home through interactive maths games, worksheets and assessments.
Enrichment Opportunities
To enhance our maths provision we organise a range of different activities for the children, including competitions, workshops, maths related after school clubs and maths themed weeks throughout the year. All of these help to develop maths skills, build a love of the subject and contribute to the student’s understanding of the world around them.
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