Welcome to the Maths Curriculum Area

Maths Vision at NJK

Maths is an essential tool for everyday life. At Norton Juxta Kempsey, we want to prepare our children to be positive and independent mathematicians, who use their number skills to decipher problems in everyday experiences. To achieve this, children should be immersed in maths throughout their school day, so that they can encounter and apply their developing sense of number both within and outside of the traditional maths lesson. We hope that children start to see problem solving as an opportunity to explore and persevere, to take risks and build resilience. Our goal is to provide the children leaving NJK with the confidence and skillset to thrive in the real world, to place them in a position where they are not held back by maths anxiety but are motivated by tackling complex problems in new and varying contexts.

Problem Solving

Across the school, each year group takes part in a structured problem solving lesson once per week. The aim behind this session, is to have a consistent approach to unpicking problem solving where every age group follows the same model.

Our vision for problem solving using this model, was developed with guidance from Can Do Maths problem solving approaches. It is our hope that by teaching specific sessions this way we:

• Have a consistent format across the school to enable clear progression from year to year.
• Reinforce retrieval and recall strategies by focusing on a different area of maths each week, one that is separate from the year group's current block of learning.
• Build up a bank of resources for sessions sourced from TestBase – the database for SATs questions, so children become used to the format of SATs style questions from Y1 to Y6.
• Celebrate a ‘Problem Solver of the Week’ to encourage all abilities of achievement and capture a portfolio of evidence across the school.
• Encourage children to see problems differently and to use oracy skills to predict and unpick what a problem could be.

Maths Language and Vocabulary

Language and vocabulary are at the heart of NJK’s maths curriculum. We believe that consistency in the way we speak about maths is crucial in how children articulate their own understanding. We encourage a shared maths vocabulary that is developed and strengthened across phases. By empowering children with specific maths language, we give them a voice to reason and discuss. We want children to be as assertive in maths as they are in any other lesson across the school day.

How do we nurture our maths vision and what does maths look like at Norton Juxta Kempsey?

• Lesson design following Mastery approach with Teach it, Do it, Secure it, Deepen it
• Problem Solving session following same model across whole school but focusing on a separate learning block than the one being currently taught
• Planning guided and resourced through White Rose Education Maths curriculum
• Fluency opportunities – using online and concrete resources
• Weekly small group sessions with the teacher to pre-teach and target teach
• Targeted interventions – using Fluency Bee, Number Sense and Precision Teaching
• Oracy skills – Use of stem sentences to scaffold articulation and reasoning
• Vocabulary displayed and updated
• Embedding maths strategies and models
• Investigations with a learning culture that to have trialled many methods is more important than achieving a single answer
• Collaborative approaches to learning and problem solving - using talk partners and working in groups
• Community engagement – inviting in families for the children to share their learning with
• Counting wherever and whenever!
• Real-life skills woven into the school day – using money, telling the time, managing/organising groupings, analysing patterns and representing findings