All about Maths at Wood Ley
Please click here to see a presentation all about how we teach maths at Wood Ley. We hope this presentation will help you have conversations about maths with your children at home.
Mathematics makes a significant contribution to modern society and at Wood Ley we consider it to be vital for the life opportunities of our children. We strive to enable fascination and an excitement to discover mathematical concepts and to broaden children’s knowledge and understanding of how mathematics is used in the wider world.
At Wood Ley we ensure children have transferable mathematical skills, the ability to reason and solve problems, and a well-developed vocabulary. We believe that the language of mathematics is international, the subject transcends cultural boundaries and its importance is universally recognised. We provide children with the opportunity to explore mathematics using a range of concrete, abstract and pictorial resources.
Solving problems using numerical fluency is the basis of our mathematical lessons. We hope children experience a sense of awe and wonder as they solve a problem for the first time, discover a more elegant solution and make links between different areas of mathematics. We ensure that children leave Wood Ley with a logical and creative number fluency and with an ability to recall key number facts such as multiplication tables. We know that this is the strongest foundation we can give our children as their use of mathematics becomes more sophisticated.
We strive at Wood Ley, to ensure children are curious, ask questions and ultimately enjoy their maths lessons. Skills for learning are a high priority. For example being able to explain ideas and respond to feedback from teachers and peers are crucial to our curriculum. Being confident, resilient, able to persevere and show determination is at the core of what we want to achieve. After all, mathematics helps us to understand and change the world.
What we do at Wood Ley
At Wood Ley, we follow the White Rose Scheme of Learning from the early years through to year 6. Here is a link to our detailed maths pathways. We are incredibly proud of the maths learning that takes place in our school and regularly achieve well in the KS2 SATs which we are always incredibly pleased with! We aim to make our maths lessons interesting and exciting with a mix of learning resources and experiences. We don’t just believe that maths needs to be taught at desks in the classroom because maths is everywhere! We aim to take our lessons outside when we can and the children absolutely love this type of learning!
‘It’s fun and helps you to learn!’
‘It makes things easier to understand.’
‘You don’t know that you are working!’
‘A fun way to learn!’
When asked, 96% of our children said they ‘loved’ Active Maths!
As a school, we are always looking ‘outward’ when looking to develop our subjects and maths is no different. Through working with other schools and practitioners throughout the country we have developed our maths teaching year on year.
We are always keen to share what we do in maths at Wood Ley and would love for you to take a look at our monthly Maths Newsletter that we release. Below is an example (others can be found in the tab above).
Times Table Rockstars, Prodigy Maths, Early Bird Maths and Maths of The Day are all key elements to our maths curriculum and it’s through working with others that have allowed us to develop these and integrate them into our school.
Times Table Rockstars
All of our children have individual logins to Times Table Rockstars. They love using the game at school and at home. We believe that learning times tables is at the heart of maths and through using this fun, interactive and competitive game the children are making huge progress in this area. We celebrate our children's achievements too by having a weekly rock off in assembly to see who the times table champion of the week is and who can make it on the Wall of Fame!
Prodigy Maths
Our children love using Prodigy Maths. Prodigy maths is all about engaging and visualising maths. Engage: students as they explore the Prodigy Maths Game world, where they answer maths questions to complete epic quests and earn in-game rewards. Visualise: student progress, align in-game questions and motivate maths learning with powerful tools for educators and parents.
Early Bird Maths
We start each day of the week with Early Bird Maths. The children come into school, put their bags away and are straight into learning. It is at the teacher's discretion as to how they approach Early Bird Maths but for many it's a great chance for the children to show off their times tables and arithmetic skills. The additional 20 minutes of maths each morning equates to an extra hour of maths a week, which is an extra 39 hours of learning maths over the year! We have found that it focuses our children as they enter the classrooms and has impacted positively on our maths outcomes too!