Maths
Mathematics is a creative and highly inter-connected discipline that has been developed over centuries, providing the solution to some of history’s most intriguing problems. It is essential to everyday life, critical to science, technology and engineering, and necessary in most forms of employment. A high-quality mathematics education, therefore, provides a foundation for understanding the world, the ability to reason mathematically and a sense of enjoyment and curiosity about the subject.
Mathematics is a proficiency which involves confidence and competence with numbers and measures. It requires an understanding of the number system, a repertoire of computational skills and an ability to solve number problems in a variety of ways in which information is gathered by counting and measuring and is presented in graphs, diagrams, charts and tables.
Mathematics gives children a way of coming to terms with their environment. Practical tasks and real life problems can be approached from a mathematical point of view. Mathematics provides children with imaginative areas of exploration and study and gives them the materials upon which to exercise their mathematical skills. These skills are a necessary tool of everyday life. Mathematics should help children to develop an appreciation of, and enjoyment in, the subject itself; as well as a realisation of its role in other curriculum areas.
Our Curriculum
At St Michael’s, we have developed a bespoke curriculum which has been developed with our children in mind. We aim to instil confidence and independence in all of our children allowing them to be versatile, knowledgeable and reflective thinkers. In the development of our curriculum, we utilised a variety of schemes, namely White Rose and NCETM practices. Our curriculum gives children the opportunity to seek solutions and master age related skills. We give our children the extra time they need and we have added and addressed extra areas of developments to ensure our students are well rounded competent mathematicians:
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Year 3- Position and direction and temperature
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Year 4- Time, capacity and volume, temperature and Mass
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Year 5- Temperature, length, time and money.
Reasoning and problem skills are our top priority and we have developed our teaching in order to offer the children an understanding of maths that can be used across disciplines and applied to real life. We encourage children to explore and formulate conjectures understanding core skills and links between maths such as fractions, decimals and percentages. We also develop our arithmetic skills through a ‘Daily practice’ which is given to students from Years 1 to Year 6.
When learning times tables we encourage our children to explore patterns and strategies to understand numbers giving our children the basis and fundamental skills needed to achieve.
