Beckers Green is currently using White Rose materials to support a mastery approach to the teaching and learning of mathematics.   The planning has number at its heart, with a large proportion of time spent reinforcing number to build competency.

The planning also ensures teachers stay in the relevant Key Stage to support depth of knowledge of each topic, while providing opportunities to build reasoning and problem-solving elements into the curriculum.  The White Rose curriculum for each year group can be seen below. 

As a school we firmly believe all children when introduced to a new concept should be taught using the following approaches:

• Concrete – children should have the opportunity to use concrete opportunities and manipulatives to help them understand what they are doing.
• Pictorial – alongside this children should be able to use pictorial representations. These representations can then be used to solve problems.
• Abstract – both concrete and pictorial representations should support children’s understanding of abstract methods.

We encourage children to become independent thinkers and learners through the use of choose and challenge each day. Children will experience 5 stages of each maths lesson: explore, model, shared practise, independent practise and reflect and challenge. During the ‘explore’ stage of learning children are given time to discuss, reason, make connections and prove their learning through open ended/discussion-based questions related to their learning. The teacher will then ‘model’ the learning before ‘shared practise’ where children will work through examples together (in their book) to refer back to later to help them during their ‘independent practise’.

During the ‘independent practise’, children will have the choice of ‘ready and steady’ challenges which will focus on fluency/varied fluency (most days). Children also have the option of starting on ‘warm up’ if they need further support. Following ‘independent practise’, the class will move onto the ‘reflect and challenge’ section of the lesson where the whole class will attempt problem solving/reasoning with the teacher modelling before moving onto ‘go and turbo’ to practise this independently. Therefore, the children gain confidence in the process they are learning and through continual reinforcement the learning will be embedded and reach the long-term memory.

The use of metacognition in maths is also a driving force to encourage children to become independent thinkers, each day they have to explain their level of understanding at different points throughout the lesson (First, Before and After stage) and then explain how they will further develop their understanding to make progress and be successful. Where possible, we aim to link new knowledge to existing knowledge they have previously acquired. 

We encourage children to learn their times tables both in school and at home.  Many enjoy the Rockstars app which can be found below by clicking on the link.  Classes run competitions to improve speed and accuracy.  

https://play.ttrockstars.com/auth/school 

We also use the Numberbots app and run regular competitions to improve knowledge of number bonds.

Please see information below which includes White Rose curriculum for each year group, our calculation polices, our intent, implementation and impact document and an evaluation of maths at Beckers Green (SEF).