At Lantern Lane, we believe that every child has the potential to become both an enthusiastic and able mathematician. Maths is a vital skill for future life; it encourages curiosity, independent thought and develops resilience to challenge.
Our curriculum meets the aims of the national curriculum, which promotes fluency, reasoning and problem-solving.
We believe that for our children to become confident mathematicians with secure conceptual understanding, our curriculum must be sequenced carefully, ensuring place value comes before addition and subtraction, and addition comes before multiplication (as a model of repeated addition). Our curriculum ensures that each small step on the journey of understanding is explicitly taught within blocks of learning and that all children have the time and scope to work in depth across the objectives.
We do this at Lantern Lane by applying a teaching for mastery approach and following the White Rose Maths Long Term Overviews, which we believe are sequenced correctly to fully support what we are trying to achieve. In practice, children undertake 4 or 5 maths lessons per week, which follow these small steps; alongside this, they complete further short burst fluency sessions (e.g. TT Rockstars, Mastering Number) as well as developing maths skills where appropriate across the wider curriculum.
Maths’ lessons follow a consistent approach across school. There is a fluency starter, where the children have the chance to secure key facts. This is followed by revisiting key knowledge and skills that will form the foundations upon which the new learning will be built. Worked examples are used extensively as are both concrete and pictorial representations (e.g. diennes, place value counters and bar models).
Children are given the opportunity to rehearse understanding and practise skills repeatedly before they are asked to work independently. We use mistakes and misconceptions as an essential part of the learning.
In line with our mastery approach, both the teaching sequence and tasks are carefully designed to both support and stretch learners. We aim to intervene quickly (wherever possible on the same day) if children need further instruction or practice. Meanwhile, very able learners in maths are challenged to apply their understanding in wider contexts or to provide the explanations that ensure they need to think very deeply about the problems explored and the methods they have chosen.
We use the TTRockstars and Numbots websites to support our children with critical times table learning and number knowledge – and encourage their use at home also.
Please find guidance about how to use them: Guide for Numbots and TT Rock Stars
Here are some websites to use at home to practise the maths skills your child has been learning in class – and have some fun too!