Teaching for Mastery:  Maths

As we continue to embed Teaching for Mastery at Langar the staff have seen a huge increase in the children's enthusiasm and engagement in maths, which has resulted in improved academic performance.

The children are becoming more familiar with the way maths is taught in school, with a back and forth approach between teacher and students, and a more collaborative approach to discussion and reasoning between children before independent tasks are set. This is move away from the outdated approach of a teacher standing at the front of the class and delivering an input for 10 minutes and then the children work through reams of sums for the remainder of the lesson.

In order to aid your child increase confidence and be more familiar and fluent with recall of number facts, and to help provide a bank of knowledge to improve pattern and connection spotting in maths, each class is sending home regular fluency facts to learn. The aim is that your child can learn these by rote, so the facts are there when needed. Being able to calculate a times table is fine, but the ideal outcome in learning them is that the children can say them and not have to think about them, so when practising at home, this is the standard to look for.

Thank you for your continued support,

Mr Owen-Jones

Teaching for Mastery Specialist

Maths Lead

The Maths Curriculum at Langar

In keeping with Teaching for Mastery approaches, maths is taught following a sequence of small coherent steps. To facilitate this, staff in all year groups follow the small steps in the White Rose Primary scheme of Learning. 

This scheme provides a long and medium term plan to ensure curriculum coverage as well as a variety of representations and structures that are used to stimulate children's mathematical thinking and underpin conceptual understanding across the different areas of maths.

As well as small steps in medium term plans, lessons are carefully designed by staff to move slowly and deeply through conceptual understanding, creating challenge by testing and exploring the focus concept. Lessons are designed to ensure children have time to reason and give explanations that prove their understanding before moving on to the next step.

The calculation policy document complied by White Rose Maths shows the variation of procedures and representations used to explain these procedures within lessons. Please feel free to take a look, especially if you would like to help your child at home.