"Without mathematics, there’s nothing you can do. Everything around you is mathematics. Everything around you is numbers."
- Shakuntala Devi
Mathematics is important in everyday life. It is integral to all aspects of life and with this in mind at St Charles’ Primary School we endeavour to ensure that children develop a positive and enthusiastic attitude towards mathematics that will stay with them throughout their lives.
At St Charles’ we teach a bespoke balanced and progressive maths curriculum which supports our pupil’s ability to reason, problem solve and develop fluent conceptual understanding in each area of Mathematics.
What are the main principles?
Our Maths curriculum is designed to ensure that teaching and learning supports our core principles. Teachers plan lessons that incorporate the three aims of the National Curriculum: fluency, reasoning and problem solving.
Fluency, which forms the basis of our maths curriculum allows children to enquire through a range of concrete, pictorial and abstract approaches, which are used to develop conceptual understanding so that children are confident in their understanding and their skills and knowledge in mathematics. Fluency is further developed and enhanced by daily ‘4 a day’ questions and weekly arithmetic practice from Year 2 onwards. This gives children opportunity to embed fundamental mathematical concepts, which they can then apply across the wider maths curriculum.
Children explore and solve problems by applying their mathematics to a variety of routine and non-routine problems with increasing sophistication, including breaking down problems into a series of simpler steps and persevering in seeking solutions.
All children are able to ‘opt out’ of the work they are completing and challenge themselves through reasoning and problem solving to apply their skills; this gives children the opportunity to explore further, apply the depth of their knowledge and express what they have learnt.