Maths Curriculum

'The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God'
- Euclid

"A high-quality mathematics education provides a foundation for understanding the world, the ability to reason mathematically, an appreciation of the beauty and power of mathematics, and a sense of enjoyment and curiosity about the subject."  Primary National Curriculum 2021

Our Vision

The Mathematics curriculum at Rimrose Hope aims to develop children’s ability to calculate, reason and solve problems.  A high-quality mathematics education provides a foundation for understanding the world, the ability to reason mathematically, an appreciation of the beauty and power of mathematics, and a sense of enjoyment and curiosity about the subject.  We strive to foster an engaging and accessible curriculum that ensures all children have access to a rich, deep, varied and enjoyable mathematical experience. 

Our Curriculum

At Rimrose Hope, we have created a bespoke curriculum to suit the needs of all our pupils.  In consultation with our Primary Maths Consultant, Sarah Martin, small steps of learning have been developed by drawing on a number of different sources including: White Rose Maths materials, NCETM Teaching Spine resources,  DFE Ready to progress document and Numicon.  Our ever evolving steps are designed to support a mastery approach to teaching and learning as well as to support the aims and objectives of the National Curriculum.  

Our curriculum aims to give the children the mathematical skills needed in many areas of everyday life including future employment, but equally strives to develop the children’s enjoyment and curiosity in the subject.

Our Pedagogy

The way in which we teach Maths is based on research into the way children learn, with a focus on giving the children clear images to support their thinking. Teaching is based on the research of Jerome Bruner who proposed three modes of representation:

• Concrete representation (action-based)
• Pictorial representation (image-based)
• Symbolic representation (language-based)

Mathematical topics are taught following this process so that the children learn in a hands on way, moving when they are ready to thinking in terms of images than finally thinking of maths in terms of numbers and symbols.

Fluency

We develop children's fluency through varied and frequent practice with increasingly complex problems over time, so that pupils have conceptual understanding and are able to recall and apply their knowledge rapidly and accurately to problems.  We develop the 2 types of fluency: conceptual and procedural.  Conceptual fluency allows the children to understand concepts, operations and relationships. This gives the children the ability to carry out calculations accurately, efficiently and flexibly (procedural fluency).

Reasoning

Children's mathematical understanding is then applied to reasoning where the children explain their understanding, generalise, justify and prove their mathematics. This is done through a 'twist' where, for example, the children explain a mistake, identify errors or find an odd one out and proves mastery of the objective. 

Problem Solving

When the children are confident with a topic, they do problem solving activities.  These cover the 5 strands of problem solving: word problems, finding all possibilities, describing rules and patterns, visual puzzles and diagrams and logic.

Medium term plans