Overview of Curriculum Subjects: Numeracy

We teach numeracy through a maths mastery approach. This approach means that teaching focusses on children mastering key concepts and building on their knowledge each year (a spiral curriculum!). Maths Mastery focusses on a child's ability to reason about a concept and make connections to other concepts. It also focusses on procedural fluency with conceptual understanding, i.e. the understanding of how and why something in maths works.

At Frome Valley First School, we use the White Rose Maths scheme to teach Maths Mastery.

Key Components of Maths Mastery

Talking in whole sentences: when giving an answer in a maths lesson, we encourage children to speak in whole sentences and use the correct vocabulary to explain their answers.

Stem sentences: these are often sentence starters which help children explain their thinking. Children can then use stem sentences to answer a question in a maths lesson.

Concrete. pictorial and abstract (CPA): this focusses on children learning new concepts through concrete resources (e.g. cubes, rekenreks, coins etc...) before they move to a pictorial representation of the concept. Finally, they explore the concept in a more abstract way.

Variation: for a child to understand a concept, they need to see variations of that concept. They need to see examples (e.g. different examples of a triangle) but also non-examples (e.g. shapes that are not a triangle and the reason why).

Fluency: it is important that children can recall mathematical facts and concepts without thinking. In particular, this includes number bonds (e.g. 4+2; 7-9; 12-4; 14+6), subitising (to recall mathematics facts and concepts without thinking) and times tables. With fluency, children can use their number sense to solve problems. Fluency is knowledge in the long term memory which then frees up the working memory to solve problems in maths.

Early number knowledge: we use Numberblocks to support children's understanding of numbers and, in particular, number bonds.

Link to BBC Numberblocks

You can find out more about maths mastery through reading the information sheet for parents (see below).

Year Group Maths Overviews

Below, you will find the curriculum overviews for maths for each subject.

There are also knowledge organisers that can help you know more about what your child is learning at school. You can find these knowledge organisers on the class pages under curriculum.

Frome Valley CE First School

Overview of Curriculum Subjects: Numeracy