St Peter’s CE Primary School
Mathematics
‘Pure mathematicians just love to try unsolved problems- they love a challenge.’
Andrew Wiles
Our approach
This sums up our approach to Maths at St Peter’s - the children here love a challenge. Our focus is on understanding, rather than simply learning methods. The Mathematics curriculum has been designed to provide children with a deep understanding of concepts and the ability to communicate confidently using precise mathematical language.
Problem solving is a key part of our mathematics teaching. This allows the children to develop links across all four operations, as well as encouraging them to take risks and have fun with mathematics through trial and improvement, establishing patterns or acting out a problem. Our children are always eager to collaborate and share their ideas.
At St Peter’s we ensure that our children learn mathematics in exciting ways, using real-life contexts and motivating problems to deepen their understanding. We teach a broad curriculum with practical opportunities to learn about shape, space, measure and handling data, such as surveying other children at break times and measuring parts of their bodies to investigate ratios.
The curriculum
Mathematics is taught daily following the White Rose (WR) units; our children have practical, hands-on learning experiences, using resources to support the development of their mathematical knowledge and reasoning. Throughout each year, children will develop their knowledge in Place Value, Addition and Subtraction, Multiplication and Division, Fractions, Decimals and Percentages, Shape and Measure.
Mental arithmetic is taught as part of every lesson. It is our aim that the children know all of the times tables up to 12 x12 by the end of Year 4. Children are taught a variety of strategies to learn their tables and we encourage parents to help with their learning at home. Children have access to TTRockstars which help embed these number facts and multiplication facts both in school and at home. We also provide every child with a subscription to Mathletics, an online maths learning programme, which further supports the development of their mathematical knowledge and understanding.
Our policy for written calculation methods ensures that our children learn accurate, efficient methods that build upon their understanding of number. Alongside sharing this policy with parents, we endeavour to keep parents informed about the methods taught at school, so that they are able to support their child’s mathematical learning at home.
Attainment
Maths is a real strength here in terms of pupil attainment- children achieve highly. Our pupils make above expected progress in mathematics as they move through the school and consistently achieve significantly above national and borough expectations at the end of both Key Stage One and Key Stage Two. This is due to high-quality teaching, careful assessment of learning, our rich curriculum, extension daily questions and well-planned intervention support to help children when required.
Events
STEM week 2024
In January 2024, maths was celebrated as part of our Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths week. The children took part in a number of practical activities to enhance their learning, particularly around capacity when planning, designing and evaluating their experiments !
We regularly participate in national maths events, such as Maths Week London, which allows the children to practise maths, have fun and compete against other classes from across the country.
Our calculation policy
Our yearly overviews (W.R.)
