At St Swithun Wells, we have a relentless aim to ensure that our children become fluent mathematicians who are prepared for the next stage in their education. Our Maths curriculum is bespoke to our school so that it can be tailored to the specific needs of the children. To help them understand the structures of mathematics, they use concrete resources and pictorial representations; once they have mastered these, the children are taught abstract, formal methods.
All children complete a daily Maths lesson and some additional time is spent over-learning the key facts, such as number bonds and times tables. The learning is sequenced both during a lesson and over a series of lessons so that the children learn the key concepts and then have repeated opportunities to apply these to a variety of problem-solving concepts; wherever possible, these are linked to real-life, practical situations. As well as problem solving, all pupils are taught to reason mathematically by developing an argument and justifying it using mathematical language.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we believe that Maths should be fun and relevant to the children. We do not want any child at our school to feel that they “can’t do” or that they "don’t see the point" of Maths!