Filter by:

Mathematics

At Harris Primary Academy East Dulwich, we recognise maths as an essential life skill, and we are committed to ensuring that all children have a positive and meaningful experience of the subject. We aim to present maths as a challenging, exciting and relevant subject in order to promote a confident attitude.

As a whole school, we follow the mastery approach to the teaching and learning of mathematics, our rationale our approach to teaching mathematics lay within the research on the White Rose scheme, as well as the 2014 National Curriculum, which states:

Most pupils move through the programmes of study at broadly the same pace
Pupils who grasp concepts rapidly should be challenged
Those who are not sufficiently fluent with earlier material should consolidate their understanding

In our Early Years, we use an approach to mathematics teaching based on White Rose. The principles are based on a concrete – pictorial – abstract – cycle of learning. There are many reasons that this approach develops understanding so well, but one key factor is its step-by-step approach that can be used at home or in the classroom. Young children are happy playing with blocks or drawing pictures. But they can find number symbols like 5 + 2 = 7 mystifying!

The mastery method begins by allowing children to start learning about maths by playing with real objects, blocks or cut-out pictures. They build confidence with the basic ideas of adding and taking away. There is then a second stage of drawing pictures representing the objects. And only later do they gradually start to add numbers to their drawings...

Beyond the early years our children will build on their learning using a range of strategies tailored to our children. This is underpinned by highly visual and concrete approaches to mathematics and is fully aligned to the expectations set out in the National Curriculum 2014. This approach has a strong base of evidence to show it really develops knowledge and understanding for all pupils including our most able.

Children must be exposed to different representations of mathematical concepts in order to embed understanding, as well as manipulating known number facts through missing number scenarios. There is a strong emphasis on maths talk and learning key mental basic skills, such as number bonds, multiplication facts and the inverses. The expectations of the National Curriculum have changed and whilst it is important to challenge all pupils, we must also ensure that children are making progress towards mastery level by having opportunities to reason about number and recognise patterns and relationships; which will only be the case if pupils are taught how to develop these skills. Our maths approach is supported further by the use of White Rose resources.

To support parents' understanding, we run workshops about calculating methods for parents. Please see our diary of events for details and dates. Sometimes, the methods of calculating we teach are different from those parents and carers used when they were at school. If you have any questions about mathematics at Harris Primary East Dulwich, please do speak to your class teacher.

We use Timestable Rockstar to support our teaching of Mathematics at Harris Primary East Dulwich. If you want to find out more about Timestable rockstar, you might find the following links useful.

https://ttrockstars.com/page/features

https://www.toddingtonstgeorge.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/A-Parents-Guide-To-Times-Table-Rocksatrs.pdf