Intent, Implementation and Impact for the Maths curriculum at Eastfield Infant and Nursery school.

Maths Rationale

Our aim at Eastfield Infant and Nursery school is to ensure all children have a firm grounding in mathematics. We aim to provide a relevant, challenging and enjoyable maths curriculum for all children. Through our curriculum, children develop the use of mathematical language through speaking and listening, including reasoning and explanations. We enable all children to understand the value of mathematics in everyday situations.

Intent

In Early years at Eastfield Infant and Nursery we provide a high quality and stimulating Mathematics curriculum by providing challenging and playful opportunities. We understand the need for high quality environments and meaningful interactions, which enable children to develop their mathematical thinking and vocabulary.

Throughout the school, we intend to provide children with a high quality, broad and challenging Mathematics curriculum. Children are given the opportunity to become fluent in the fundamentals of maths, develop their conceptual understanding and the ability to apply knowledge accurately and rapidly. Children will be able to reason mathematically by following a line of enquiry, justifying their explanations, making links to known facts or by providing proof using mathematical language. Problem solving develops their understanding of mathematical concepts and provides real life situations to apply the mathematical knowledge. We are ambitious in our expectations of all pupils, and develop confident, resilient, self-motivated mathematicians.

Implementation

At Eastfield Infant and Nursery School we are currently taking part in the Cambridgeshire Maths Hub, NCETM “Developing Mastery” course. This has included introducing new Maths vocabulary such as addend, minuend, subtrahend, factor, product, dividend, divisor and quotient.

In the EYFS, we provide many exciting opportunities, through planned purposeful play and a mix of adult-led and child initiated activities. These aim to develop and improve their skills in counting, understanding and using number, calculating simple addition and subtraction problems and to recognise numerical patterns.

Throughout Key Stage 1, we follow the White Rose Maths Schemes of Learning and supplement this with resources from NCETM Mastery documents and NRICH to teach a broad and challenging curriculum. Our curriculum provides many opportunities for children to become confident and fluent with whole numbers, counting and place value. Children are taught to be practical and use concrete resources before moving on to reasoning and problem solving activities. This allows them to deepen their conceptual understanding before applying their skills in various situations. The children are equipped with the skills to recognise shapes and their properties and measures to describe and compare length/height, mass, capacity/volume, time and money.

In addition to daily Mathematics lessons, children take part in solving ‘4 a day’ problems provided by Cambridgeshire Maths Hub. These develop fluency and accuracy of mathematics skills and provide an opportunity to revisit and review misconceptions and deepen previously taught content.

The Maths curriculum is also supplemented with sessions of Fluency Bee from White Rose. These sessions aim to develop fluency in number facts skills which can be then be used during the main Maths sessions.

Impact

The impact that we see, through evidence in their work books and termly data collection, is that children know more and remember more. They are able to recall prior learning and apply them in a range of contexts, for example when problem solving or when finding more than one possible answer to a question. Children are able to explain their understanding by reasoning and justifying the methods they have chosen and how they solved the problem. Children are fluent in the necessary skills needed to be able to build on their learning as they progress through the school.

Termly tracking, progress meetings, learning walks and book scrutinies show children make good progress and have a secure understanding of mathematics. Live marking provides immediate feedback to children to review misconceptions and challenge those who show they have a good understanding.

If you were to walk into a Maths lesson at Eastfield Infant and Nursery school you would see:

• Engaged children working with concrete resources
• Discussion and collaboration as a whole class, in small groups and with learning partners
• Children making connections with prior knowledge
• All children using mathematical vocabulary to explain their learning
• Children challenged with problem solving and reasoning activities
• Teachers supporting and challenging learners through live marking and verbal feedback
• Resilient children
• Engaging working walls showing What a Good One Looks like (WAGOLL), concrete resources, key vocabulary, stem sentences and wow work.