Maths Intent

At Brownsover Community School we strive to become mathematically observant: to spot maths everywhere! We encourage a positive, confident interest and attitude to mathematics and provide a wide range of mathematical experiences to enable all children to succeed. We seek opportunities to apply our mathematical learning into real life contexts, ensuring our learning is purposeful and practical. We explore new learning with a range of concrete resources and representation to support and develop a deeper understanding alongside reasoning and problem solving skills. We are actively encouraged to use mathematical vocabulary and ‘Maths Talk’ is a fundamental part of our maths lessons. This helps our spoken language development and provides us with a scaffold to explain our mathematical understanding. We learn our number facts to help us develop fluency and know how to use these to solve more complex problems. We develop children’s number sense and help children to come to appreciate the power of number patterns and relationships.

Maths Implementation

In Nursery we have 1 or 2 maths group times a week that are 10-15 minutes long. We learn number rhymes and songs to help us with our counting. We always count how many children are at our group time and how many children are away. This helps us to use our counting skills in every day contexts. Our teachers make sure we have different opportunities to consolidate our new maths learning in our environment. They plan activities for us to explore pattern, shape, size, weight, comparing objects, begin linking numerals to amounts and other early maths skills. We also begin using our maths learning to help us solve problems with numbers up to 5 too! Our teachers help us to begin talking about our maths too and listen carefully to us when we are playing and talking with our friends. This tells them what maths learning we are doing well with or where we might need some extra help.

In Reception we have 5 maths carpet times a week that are 15 minutes long. 4 of our maths carpet times follow NCTEM ‘Mastering Number Programme’. 1 of our maths carpet times follow White Rose Maths (version 3) for Shape, Space and Measures. During carpet time our teacher will teach us some new learning. This new learning is followed up by an activity that we do with our teachers. Different groups will work with the teachers at different times throughout the week. We can also find maths all around us in our environment. Our water area, maths shelves and small maths table always have maths activities to help us consolidate our learning but our teachers are also great at creating opportunities that let us use our maths learning in everything we do!

Our maths lessons follow a special structure:

1. Our lessons start with a maths song or video. This helps us to learn number facts and consolidate key vocabulary, all while being active and having fun!
2. Our new maths vocabulary is shared. We learn our new maths words with actions to help us learn what they mean.
3. Our new learning starts with fluency questions to warm up our brains. Our teachers will model our new learning and the some of the full sentences we might use in our ‘Maths Talk’.
4. All our lessons will have ‘Maths Talk’. This is where we have to explore a problem or solve an equation, using concrete resources to help us. We work in partners to do this and have to use our maths vocabulary to explain our understanding. We try our best to speak in full sentences too!
5. After ‘Maths Talk’ we complete our Independent Work. We work through the tricky, trickier and trickiest challenges and use our honesty value to choose which challenge is best for us. Usually the tricky challenge means we are working towards age related expectations, the trickier challenge means we are working at age related expectations and the trickiest challenge means we are exceeding age related expectations.  Sometimes Brownsover Bear has a mastery challenge question for us to answer too and these are available to anyone who has confidently completed the tricky challenge. Brownsover Bear likes to ask us lots of questions.
   Some of the questions he has asked us are:
   - What’s the same and what’s different?
   - Can you explain it?
   - True or false?
   - Can you spot the mistake?
   - Can you spot the pattern?
6. We end our learning with a problem solving or a reasoning question. This means that everyone has the opportunity to use their learning in a different way and can hear how other people have reached the answers. Again, we use our maths vocabulary to explain our understanding.

If we are exploring new learning then our Maths Talk part of the lesson will continue. We use lots of different resources to help us visualise our learning and understand new concepts. Our teachers make sure we have lots of time to solve problems practically before moving on. All of our practical learning can be seen in lots of photographs in our Maths Learning Showcase book. After we have worked practically we move on to looking at pictures or drawing pictures to represent our learning. These pictures become a strategy we can use to help us solve problems independently.

Our teachers are always watching to see how we use our maths learning and listen carefully for how we use our maths vocabulary. They ask us lots of different questions and this helps them to see how they can help us or challenge us even more! Completing the independent work challenges helps our teachers to see what we can do well, what we need to be challenged in next time or what we need some support with.

After each unit of new learning, we have a special quiz to see how much of this we can use independently. Our teachers use our scores from this to make plans for specific groups of children and our teachers are great at planning extra maths opportunities to help us. If there are children in our class who have significant SEND needs, our teacher may have planned a personalised maths curriculum for them to make progress from their starting points.

In Key Stage One we have 4 maths lessons a week, which are 55 minutes long, and follow White Rose Maths (version 3) Schemes of Learning. Each of our lessons is a White Rose Small Step, which helps us to feel successful with our maths learning every lesson and, because of this, we feel more confident to challenge ourselves.

In addition to this we have 4 ‘Mini Maths’ sessions. Our school is part of the NCTEM ‘Mastering Number Programme’ and, in Key Stage One, we call this ‘Mini Maths’. These 10-15 minute sessions help us to develop our fluency and confidence with number facts and composition of numbers. Our ‘Mini Maths’ sessions focus on using manipulatives to explore and secure quick recall of number and these help to make sure that everyone feels confident to join in. We all join in with ‘Mini Maths’ and use repeated sentences, as a class or with our partners, to help us learn and remember the number facts. We know that learning these simple number facts will help us when we come to work with greater numbers when we are older and become successful mathematicians of the future. Our ‘Mini Maths’ session often include a short clip from BBC television series called Numberblocks! They are so catchy and we love singing along with some of the songs.

 Maths Impact

We love maths at Brownsover! We love exploring new concepts with practical resources and like learning about different representations. We love looking at maths in lots of different ways! We are encouraged to use full sentences to share our understanding and develop our reasoning skills. We love to challenge ourselves.

In 2022 GLD was 63% (National was 66%).
Specific Learning Goals (Number and Numerical Patterns) was 81% (National was 77%).
KS1 Maths: 70% Expected standard or above (National: 68%)

In 2023 GLD was 52% (National was 65%).
KS1 Maths: 72% Expected standard or above (National: 70%)