What is the 'Mathematics Area' ?

Hello. My name is Miss Dean and one of my responsibilities here at Meopham Community Academy is as Mathematics Subject Leader. My main responsibility within this role is to oversee, guide and monitor how we teach Mathematics across the school.

The role of Maths Leader could be summarised as follows:

• To lead the teaching of Mathematics in order to secure high quality teaching and learning and the effective use of resources to bring about improved standards of achievement for all pupils.

As Maths Leader I am charged with developing, implementing, monitoring and maintaining maths teaching policies and practices which reflect the school’s commitment to high achievement and which are consistent with national and school strategies and policies.

I am responsible for initiating schemes of work that offer appropriate challenges to all pupils and, upon evaluation, demonstrate that they have been successful in enabling the pupils to make good progress.

Our Mathematics Policy and Written Calculations policies are available on our website here:

Miss S Dean

Mathematics Subject Leader

Curriculum

The national curriculum for mathematics aims to ensure that all pupils:

• become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics, including through varied and frequent practice with increasingly complex problems over time, so that pupils develop conceptual understanding and the ability to recall and apply 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

At Meopham Community Academy, we are passionate about teaching mathematics. We love seeing our pupils develop passion for the subject and aspiring to be challenged.

Maths lessons are taught daily mixed ability classes. We follow the White Rose Maths Hub scheme of work, where topics such as fractions, calculation, geometry, are taught in blocks. Details of these blocks (for each year group) can be found in the curriculum area of our website together with our detailed Mathematics Curriculum Overviews:

Online Maths Games

All year groups

Reception

Year R - Maths

Key Stage 1 (Years 1 and 2)

Year 1 - Maths

Year 2 - Maths

Key Stage 2 (Years 3 and 4)

Year 3 - Maths

Year 4 - Maths

Key Stage 2 (Years 5 and 6)

Year 5 - Maths

Year 6 - Maths

Maths Mastery

We use the Maths Mastery approach allowing more time for pupils to grasp key concepts and apply their deeper understanding to reasoning and problem solving activities. It also provides less-confident mathematicians time to develop a secure and solid foundation of basic understanding.

For detailed information on Maths Mastery take a look at the following presentation:

At the presentation given by Miss Dean (Mathematics Subject Leader), attendees (parents) were given reasoning problems taken from Maths Mastery to complete. There was a question from each year group (Y1-Y6) for them to get their teeth into. Here are the answers as completed by pupils from their respective year groups:

Testimonials

Very interesting to learn how the children use manipulatives for mathematics - wish we did this when I was at school. 

Parent

Excellent - I think my daughter will benefit from the more practical/visual ways of learning.

Parent

Really informative. It sounds like a really good way to teach maths understanding and reasoning is key to grasping maths. I think it is going to help the children and I'm excited to see how they start developing.

Parent

White Rose Maths - Parent Work Books

White Rose (our Maths Scheme provider) have produced parent workbooks (workbooks pupils can complete) based on each White Rose maths topic.  The link to the workbooks is below should you wish to use these with your child/children.

World famous rock musicians are the best at what they do because they’ve spent hours practising guitar chords, writing music or playing the drums.  It is just the same with times tables – all Times Table Rock Stars need to practise, practise and practise.  It is essential that your child does a little bit of times table practice every night; short bursts of daily practise are more effective than spending hours once a week.  When it comes to times tables, speed and accuracy are important – the more facts your child remembers, the easier it is for them to do hard calculations

Times Table Rock Stars consists of a number of number of on-line short games (generally a minute each) designed to help the children develop a rapid recall of times table facts.  By playing games, children can win coins which they can ‘spend’ on updating their avatar.

Every child is also part of a ‘band’ – their ‘class band’ and their ‘house band’.  Over the year, we will have a series of Battle of the Bands.

The children are able to access Times Table Rock Star and earn coins for themselves even when they are not taking part in a ‘battle’.

To access Times Table Rock Stars, use the following link:

Make sure you favourite this link on your PC because

REMEMBER:

All Times Table Rock Stars need to practise, practise and practise.