Mathematics 

At the Grove Infant School and Nursery we believe that every child has the capacity to succeed in maths.  We follow a mastery approach which means recognising the power to think rather than just do and to tackle concepts in very small cumulative steps of learning.  By creating a solid foundation of deep understanding our children’s skills and confidence will be secure.  There is also a key emphasis on spoken language and you will often hear sentence stems with key vocabulary being used to underpin learning in lessons.                                                                                                                                                                  

We embrace a CPA approach where pupils initially use a range of concrete resources such as numicon, tens frames, tens and ones apparatus (base 10) and beadstrings to support their understanding.  Alongside the physical manipulation pupils are encouraged to model using pictorial representations before using (abstract) mathematical language to record.  You will see this in all year groups as new concepts are introduced and as existing concepts are built upon as pupils progress.

Reasoning and problem solving are woven throughout our mathematical learning as these are key to ensuring pupils conceptual understanding of the mathematics involved.  All pupils are encouraged to explain, prove/disprove and persuade others of their answers.

We challenge those children who can understand more deeply with deepening activities and we support children who might need extra scaffolding, as necessary.   

Current academic year:

From September 2021, we began to follow the Herts for Learning Essential maths planning documentation which follows a spiral progression.  There is an increased emphasis on practical exploration alongside a focus on language to secure and deepen learning as well as the playing of games to build and embed fluency. 

As we enter our 3rd year we will continue to embed our approach whilst adapting to meet the needs of our pupils.

Each academic year we adapt the planned sequences prioritising key learning based on our ongoing assessment of need to support the learning of each cohort of pupils.  

Prior Information:

In response to COVID 19, and the impact of home learning over the two academic years, we adapted our curriculum provision identifying potential key learning that we needed to revisit and updated our learning sequences to reflect this. At that time we we used both Power Maths and White Rose documentation to support our curriculum progression.

Over the summer term 2021 we used the national "Ready to Progress" criteria for Year 1 and Year 2 to guide our priorities and to ensure pupils were secure in their fluency of number for the year group they were working within. 

Please find below resources that show our curriculum coverage and that will support you with key ideas and vocabulary. 

Finally, we also have a strong focus on promoting maths all around us and as a STEM subject.  In the summer of 2023 we successfully undertook a maths themed day with the juniors and in the autumn both schools are about to engage in a maths workshop to test our problem solving skills.  On each occasion we also meet with our link classes in the juniors to play some maths games.