EYFS
At Yohden Primary School, mathematics begins when our pupils enter into EYFS. Our reception children are allocated time to access the provision indoors and outdoors each morning and afternoon. They follow a ‘plan, do, review’ approach with the children’s interests at the heart of what they do. Children explore what they already know and what they would like to find out. Resources and provocations are planned for and provided the following week based around the children’s interests.
Staff are trained to extend a child’s learning within provision. Staff at our school ensure that broad opportunities are provided for the children to develop their existing skills. Reception have a LTP with overarching themes linked to festivals or seasons and these provide the provocations across the year. Books are carefully chosen by the EYFS team to support in delivery of the EYFS’s programmes of study. All of the children’s learning across the week is documented on Tapestry. Whole class activities are documented in the class floor book. These contain a range of photographic evidence and quotations made by the children showing their current mathematical progress.
In EYFS, pupils are exposed to a range of mathematical equipment such as tens-frames and numicon. Developing a familiarity with these helps our pupils transition into Year 1 and beyond. Furthermore, our EYFS curriculum uses White Rose as a building block, something that is continued when they enter KS1. Our EYFS MTP is carefully designed by the EYFS lead alongside our mathematics leader. Children are exposed to short 15 minute lessons each day to help develop their cardinality and counting, comparative skills, composition, subitising, pattern-seeking and special awareness.
Working walls are used recap prior learning and mathematical vocabulary is displayed to support this. This year, we have currently begun to incorporate nursery rhymes into our plans to further support the development of number. Nursery rhymes use patterns in language and speech, and by recognising patterns in language, pupils are also able to recognise patterns in numbers, which subsequently helps with mathematical problem-solving.
KS1 and KS2
Moving into KS1, our pupils begin to work towards the National Curriculum (2014) statements. Pupils who did not meet ARE at the end of EYFS have work differentiated to their ability to ensure that their needs are met in mathematics. Our scheme of learning builds upon White Rose but is substituted with NCETM, NRICH and Power Maths. Our mathematics lessons are consistent across school. Each week, each class has a different mental calculation warm-up/starter which is made fun and interactive for our pupils. The children then move onto facilitated input which offer experiential learning, fluency, reasoning and problem-solving activities, depending on the childrens’ current ability and progress through their current unit of study. Recent training now allows our staff to conclude lessons with high quality plenaries. These may consist of problem-free questioning, errors and misconceptions, challenges or an introduction into a new area of learning. Similar to EYFS, working walls are used recap prior learning and mathematical vocabulary is displayed to support this.
Furthermore, and again similar to EYFS, resources are available for all of our topics. Children begin to use these concrete manipulatives from reception and throughout their time at Yohden Primary School. Where possible, learning begins as experiential learning before children move onto the concrete, pictorial and abstract approaches to develop a relational rather than instrumental mathematical understanding.
Each unit of work also concludes with an assessment check to ensure children have made progress. Time has been allocated into MTPs to allow for consolidation and to address any errors and misconceptions the children have. Our units also allow for concepts to be repeated throughout the year to ensure pupils develop and maintain learned knowledge and skills. In Years 2 and 6, pupils are offered questions from previous SATs exams using Testbase to again show progress made and to develop a familiarity with this style of questioning.
