Intent

At Holy Family we aim to provide a high-quality mathematics education that will enable the children to make rich connections across mathematical ideas to develop fluency, mathematical reasoning and competence in solving increasingly sophisticated problems.

Through frequent practice of the concepts the children build their fluency and our approach places emphasis on mathematical reasoning and developing the children’s use of accurate vocabulary to explain and justify their answers. Problem solving then gives the children the opportunity to use and apply their understanding of mathematical concepts.
We endeavour to develop children’s love for learning mathematics, love for investigating and love for problem solving, so that each pupil leaves our school equipped and ready for the future and a solid foundation for understanding the world around them.
Our curriculum is designed to ensure that the children receive an abundance of rich opportunities to achieve personal excellence.  Children gain a sense of enjoyment and curiosity about the subject and are provided with opportunities to apply their mathematical knowledge across their creative curriculum topics.

Implementation

The mastery approach to teaching mathematics, focuses on developing deep conceptual learning to ensure secure foundations that pupils can build on throughout their education. From Reception to Year 6, we follow the White Rose scheme to support the children’s development in mathematical independence, confidence and competence. New mathematical concepts are introduced using a Concrete, Pictorial and Abstract approach, enabling children to experience hands-on learning together with clear models and images to aid their understanding.

The national curriculum for mathematics aims to ensure that all pupils:
 

• Become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics, including through varied and frequent practice with increasingly complex problems over time, so that pupils develop conceptual understanding and the ability to recall and apply knowledge rapidly and accurately.
• Reason mathematically by following a line of enquiry, conjecturing relationships and generalisations, and developing an argument, justification or proof using mathematical language.
• Can solve problems by applying their mathematics to a variety of routine and non-routine problems with increasing sophistication, including breaking down problems into a series of simpler steps and persevering in seeking solutions.

In the Summer Term,  we celebrated Maths Week. This was a week full of exciting activities, fun challenges and themed workshops to celebrate the importance of ‘Maths in our everyday lives’. Many parents and grandparents kindly volunteered their time to come in and lead workshops about their profession and how it links to maths in everyday life. The themes included; banking, computing, gaming, architecture, engineering, software development, accountancy, film and cinema.  

Visitors from the HSBC bank also joined us and taught the children all about budgeting and guarding against fraud. 

“Kika’s dad told us about how maths is in video games. He showed us Super Mario and Minecraft. Each picture was made up of tiny shapes. He showed us that in the past they used to have computers, but they weren’t as good, Super Mario used to be blurry but now it is much better.” Felicja 2PP

“My mum came in to talk about how to count in your head. First she asked us who knows what mental maths is. Then she started off with some easy questions like ‘what’s 2 + 2?’ Then she did some harder ones like ‘28 + 57 - 20’ Then she showed us an abacus which I use to count on. If you practise some questions on the abacus for a year, you can start doing it mentally and count on your fingers. With the abacus you can do times tables like 4320 x 1232.” Maiya 2PP