Mathematics

 At the Southwater Junior Academy, we firmly believe that all children can and will succeed in maths. To that end, we will support our children to:

• Enjoy mathematics
• Become fluent in the fundamentals and applying these in different ways
• Have a ‘feel’ for numbers that they can use when solving problems with growing complexity
• Develop factual, procedural and conceptual fluency and explain this saying “I know that …”, “I know how …” and “I know why…”
• Know, understand and be able to use a wide range of problem solving strategies to solve a range of mathematical problems
• Develop persistence and resilience to keep working on a problem when they become stuck

 These aims are achieved through careful planning and assessment by teachers across the academy. When children arrive in Year 3, they are taught in their class groups by their class teacher. Whilst children in Years 4, 5 and 6 are placed into maths groups. These groups are not centred around ability, but rather confidence and pace. All our pupils are challenged to broaden and deepen their understanding through an enriched and challenging curriculum taught in a way that meets their need. 

No matter the year, all staff use regular formative assessment in and out of the lesson to ensure that children grasp concepts and make links between the areas of maths that they are studying. This enables staff to implement any necessary interventions in a timely manner to keep children on track to reach the age related expectation set out by the curriculum.

Children are encouraged to use a variety of resources and visual representations to support their understanding across all maths lessons. Learning in the classroom is supported by home learning tasks on Freckle and Times Tables Rock Stars (TTRS). Regular competitions on TTRS across and between year group supports children to develop their recall of times tables and division facts. This not only helps them when they sit their multiplication tables check (MTC) in Year 4, but also when access various areas of the curriculum in lessons.

By the time they leave the Southwater Junior Academy, we want children to have developed the skills necessary to express relationships in numerical, graphical, symbolic, verbal and pictorial forms. But most of all, we want our children to be able to solve, and indeed pose, increasingly complex problems. Maths is not always about the precision of a direct route to a correct answer. Satisfaction - and for some, joy - is very much linked to the unfolding journey towards something that is not known.