Mathematics

When teaching maths at Our Lady & St Johns, we intend to provide a rich and meaningful curriculum, that is creative and engaging and caters for the needs of all children, setting them up with the necessary skills and knowledge to become successful in their future adventures. This curriculum gives each pupil a chance to BELIEVE in themselves as mathematicians and develop the power of resilience and perseverance when faced with mathematical challenges.

We incorporate sustained levels of challenge through varied and high quality activities with a focus on fluency, reasoning and problem solving. Our children are required to explore maths in depth, using mathematical vocabulary to reason and explain their workings.

A wide range of mathematical resources are used and pupils are taught to show their workings in a concrete, pictorial or abstract form wherever suitable. They are taught to explain their choice of methods and develop their mathematical reasoning skills. We encourage resilience, adaptability and acceptance that struggle is often a necessary step in learning.

Our curriculum allows children to make better sense of the world around them. ​ All children are expected to make progress from their starting points and to build upon their knowledge and understanding year on year.

The National Curriculum for mathematics aims to ensure that all children:

• Become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics, including through varied and frequent practice with increasingly complex problems over time, so that children have conceptual understanding and are able to recall and apply their 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.

   

  At Our Lady & St John’s we want all children to be able to see mathematics as an interconnected subject and be able to make connections across mathematical ideas to develop fluency, mathematical reasoning and competence in solving increasingly sophisticated problems. We want our children to apply their mathematical knowledge to science and other subjects.

   

  The expectation in the National Curriculum is that the majority of children will move through the programmes of study at broadly the same pace. However, decisions about when to progress should always be based on the security of children’s’ understanding and their readiness to progress to the next stage. Children who grasp concepts rapidly should be challenged through being offered rich and sophisticated problems before any acceleration through new content. Those who are not sufficiently fluent with earlier material should consolidate their understanding, including, through additional practice, before moving on.

   

  At Our Lady & St John’s teachers from year 1 to year 6 are using detailed Schemes of Learning published by the White Rose Maths Hub to plan effective maths lessons.

Number day at OLSJ!

What an amazing Number Day!

A huge thank you to all the children and

parents for making such amazing efforts with

number day costumes—the children looked

superb!  

A huge shout out to all the teachers for preparing such engaging activities for the children.

Our focus this year was on problem solving.  The children were kept busy with: Snakes and ladders, Napier’s bones, Tangrams, Pumpkin Pi problem, Mathopoly, Numicon, counting beads, making 3D shapes out of marshmallows and spaghetti noticing vertices, edges, faces. The children really had a fabulous day.

The school council would like to thank everyone for their contributions on our Just Giving page, so far we have raised £570.55—thank you.