Lower School Mathematics

Newfield School Primary Mathematics

Departmental Overview

“Mathematics will be an exciting and innovative department with a creative programme of implementing a Maths curriculum that is not seen as a self-contained subject, but one in which students can apply Maths learning to all aspects of everyday life.”

Aims

In our primary department we are aiming to lay the foundations in maths that will allow children to build a stable and solid base knowledge to help them succeed.

In order to us to do this effectively, we support our children to understand some difficult concepts by removing the obstacles that many children face in maths through a use of practical approaches broken down into smaller, more manageable sections. We know that breaking the curriculum down into small manageable steps should help children understand concepts better.

We encourage our pupils to use mathematical thinking in every lesson, throughout the curriculum and reasoning skills, to dig deeper into these concepts.

Our main asset is that we have enthusiastic and passionate teachers who work tirelessly to assist our children every day.

We believe that all children, when introduced to new concepts, should have the opportunity to build competency by taking this approach. Children are shown multiple strategies so that they can pick the method that they feel most comfortable with. As the old saying goes, “there is more than one way to crack a nut” and this applies with maths also. Once children understand the underlying concept behind an area of maths, they can use various different ways of solving the problem.

Concrete methods – children should have the opportunity to use concrete objects and manipulatives to help them understand what they are doing.

Pictorial methods – alongside this, children should use pictorial representations. These representations can then be used to help reason and solve problems.

Abstract methods – both concrete and pictorial representations should support children’s understanding of abstract methods.