Maths Intent
At Linden Road Academy, we strive to create a love and passion for maths. Our curriculum is carefully planned to ensure coverage is balanced, structured and allows for deep learning. We use White Rose as our curriculum spine, and supplement this with additional resources when necessary. Our long-term curriculum plans ensure that time allows for topics to be revisited throughout the year, giving opportunity for pupils to revisit and build on their learning. Our lessons are planned through five main domains: Variation, Fluency, Mathematical Thinking, Representation and Coherency. We use pedagogy developed in Shanghai to structure our ‘small steps’ lesson design. We believe that by working alongside pupils, teaching staff are able to guide pupils through ‘small steps’ of structured progress within a lesson. Whole class teaching is carefully differentiated through targeted questioning and different levels of support structures. Pupils will often work reciprocally, enhancing their reasoning skills as they support their peers.
All maths lessons explore elements of reasoning and problem solving, which provide fantastic opportunities for our pupils to use their Growth Mindset and resilience skills. Teachers model and encourage verbal reasoning with peers and pupils evaluate mathematical strategies, debating their efficiency.
Teaching teams explicitly model the declarative and procedural knowledge that supports children in their learning. This is displayed on Maths Working Walls in classrooms to support the children whilst working.
The fantastic resources created by the NCETM are used at Linden Road to ensure our pupils develop a strong understanding of Number and Place Value. The Mastering Early Number Programme is used as an intervention for those pupils in EYFS who need more support in their number sense. Whilst in Year 1, it is used in the Autumn term to ensure that pupils have the Early Number skills needed before they move on to more challenging content.
Fluency skills are developed through arithmetic sessions at the beginning of maths lessons over the course of a week. We have adopted pedagogy developed by Ron Berger in ‘Leaders of Our Own Learning’ by asking pupils to track their own arithmetic progress and subsequently, set themselves aspirational goals. Our pupils work together to close their gaps in arithmetic progress, learning from their peers in order to succeed. During the Summer Term, teachers use the Ready to Progress Criteria from the NCETM to create their Arithmetic fluency sheets – these ensure that pupils are secure in the elements of maths they need before moving up to the next year group.
To complement our fluency skills, pupils also engage in RRR (Recap, Remember, Retain) which allows for opportunity to revisit prior learning, and thus, commit learning into long-term memory. These sessions focus on pupils revisiting learning from their last topic, last term and last year.
SumDog is an additional tool used across school to improve pupils’ fluency through the use of it’s digital App. Pupils enjoy using the app to compete with peers both within school and at home too.
You can also follow our Maths by searching on Twitter @Linden_Maths or check out our Learning Showcase!