Corby Glen Community Primary School
How do we teach maths?
We use a mastery approach to teaching maths here at Corby Glen. The idea that every child can be exposed to Maths appropriate to their age regardless of ability is one that many would argue is unrealistic. However, for years we have watched gaps develop in the achievement of the children in our classes as they move through the school. We will never close this gap if we never expose our children to maths appropriate to their age and consistently set low expectations with our differentiation.
With our Mastery approach, we have removed the ceiling on children's achievement and their confidence and self-esteem has grown as lower achieving children in maths move at the same pace as their classmates. This has had a huge impact on all of our staff members, who have made dramatic changes in terms of teaching and learning as a result. More importantly, we have seen an impact on our children in terms of their attitude towards Maths, their conceptual understanding and their willingness to explore and investigate.
We use a scheme called ‘Maths - No Problem’ which are Singapore style books to plan and teach our maths lessons. The only way to achieve mastery is to build upon a solid foundation of conceptual understanding and procedural fluency. To ensure a good level of understanding, it is necessary to move through the curriculum at a different pace to previous years. Children will spend much longer on certain areas to fully embed the concept before moving on rather than how they were historically taught by spending approximately 1 - 2 weeks on each area, each term. We explicitly teach each topic once throughout the year but these areas of maths are met continuously through our representations and lead in stories in other maths lessons. Therefore nothing is truly taught in isolation.
What does a maths lesson look like?
Assessment takes place in every single lesson and the next lesson is adapted in response to this. Children complete review and revision sections in their Maths No Problem workbooks each time the reach the end of a topic. We also carry out unit test from White Rose and termly NFER tests for each year group.
In this section you will find videos and documents to demonstrate what the different areas of maths look like and how to support you child in their learning. For key stage specific 'how-to' guides on the different operations and the strategies used please see the links below for KS1 and KS2.
It is also important for children to not only secure strategies but to have a deep understanding (mastery) of the relationships between numbers and therefore why those strategies work. To view videos explaining this process for each operation and other areas of maths, please see below.
These documents outline all of the number objectives for each year group including EYFS. They also provide helpful guidance and examples as to possible questions and tasks that demonstrate childrens' achievement of these objectives.