At Wellsprings School we aim to provide a creative Maths curriculum that develops core calculation skills and encourages learning in areas essential to everyday life.  Through interesting and exciting lessons we provide our children with opportunities to expand their mathematical understanding with a sense of curiosity and enjoyment of the subject.

At Wellsprings we have started to introduce the mastery approach to teaching maths.

The rationale behind changing our approach to teaching mathematics lay within the NCETM Maths Hub Programme as well as the 2014 National Curriculum, which states:
• The expectation is that most pupils will move through the programmes of study at broadly the same pace.
• Pupils who grasp concepts rapidly should be challenged through being offered rich and sophisticated problems before any acceleration through new content.
• Those who are not sufficiently fluent with earlier material should consolidate their understanding, including through additional practice, before moving on.

We pride ourselves on delivering high quality maths lessons.  We deliver a broad maths curriculum: the fundamentals of mathematics, problem solving and reasoning.  We cover a range of areas: number and place value, calculation, fractions, mental arithmetic, geometry, measure and statistics and algebra.

Although all children at Wellsprings School receive a discrete daily maths lesson, we work hard to make cross-curricular links with other subjects, including science, computing, design and technology, physical education and music.

The National Curriculum for mathematics aims to ensure that all children:

• Become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics, including through varied and frequent practice with increasingly complex problems over time, so that children have conceptual understanding and are able to recall and apply their knowledge rapidly and accurately
• Reason mathematically by following a line of enquiry, conjecturing relationships and generalisations, and developing an argument, justification or proof using mathematical language
• Can solve problems by applying their mathematics to a variety of routine and non-routine problems with increasing sophistication, including breaking down problems into a series of simpler steps and persevering in seeking solutions.

Supporting your child at home

• Learning key number facts – It is vital that children learn their key number facts such as number bonds and times tables. This can and should be done at home as well as school and it is important that number facts are practised and recited regularly.
• TT Rockstars – TT Rockstars is an online maths platform that enables children to develop their maths learning through the use of fun games, activities and challenges. All children in Year 1 to 6 at Wellsprings have access to a TT Rockstars account and should access this regularly at home to develop, practise and consolidate their understanding timestables.
• Maths in real life contexts – Enabling your child to see the uses and benefits to mathematics in everyday life is very important and there are countless opportunities to allow your child to demonstrate what they have learned. Shopping, cooking and baking are great activities that can bring classroom learning into a real life situation.

Please visit our YouTube channel (Wellsprings School TV) to see a range of helpful videos explaining ways in which parents/carers can help their children in learning maths concepts.

• Maths policy
• Wellsprings School Calculation Policy
• Wellsprings Maths Action Plan 22-23