At The Mead Infant and Nursery School, it is our intent for all our children to develop mathematical skills that are essential to everyday life, to develop a positive attitude towards maths and to see themselves as ‘mathematicians’. We aim to provide children with a high-quality, broad and challenging Mathematics curriculum. Our Maths lessons enable children to become fluent in the fundamentals of maths and to develop their ability to recall and apply their mathematic knowledge quickly and accurately. Children develop their use of mathematical language through speaking and listening and we teach stem sentences to help children with this.  Children are encouraged to reason mathematically, making links to known facts and explaining their ideas using mathematical vocabulary. Children are praised for reasoning which links to our learning behaviour character ‘Winnie the Pooh’, who likes to explain. The children’s understanding of mathematical concepts will also be challenged through the use of problem solving tasks enabling them to see maths really is all around them.  

In Nursery and Reception, our young mathematicians are provided with many exciting opportunities, (through a mixture of adult-led and child-initiated activities) to develop and improve their skills in counting, their understanding of numbers, calculating simple addition and subtraction problems, doubling, halving and their ability to describe shapes, spaces and measure. 

Throughout Key Stage 1, we follow the ‘National curriculum for England’. Our Maths curriculum provides many opportunities for our older mathematicians to develop their fluency and confidence when working with counting, place value and the four operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division). The children will also develop their skills and knowledge when working with fractions, shapes, measure, time and money.  The use of practical equipment supports the children developing their understanding before they are challenged through problem solving and questioning. We are proud of the wide range of mathematical resources that we have and these are used throughout the school from Nursery to Year 2. At our school, children are praised for being resourceful like ‘Eeyore’ (linked to our learning behaviours) when using the mathematics resources!

Above are a few examples of the resources the children use in school (Left to right-Numicon, number line, dienes, tens frames and counters, bead strings and multilink)

In Key Stage 1, in addition to Mathematics lessons, children also take part in ‘Speedy Maths’ sessions. Fluency and accuracy of key mathematics skills are developed during these sessions and provide an opportunity to revisit and review previously taught topics and the fundamentals of maths.

To ensure children feel positively about Maths, we never mark work as ‘wrong’ but instead we indicate with a dot that a child needs to ‘re-think’ their answer just like Wise Owl (linked to our learning behaviours). Throughout the process children are praised for being ‘Tiggers’ (linked to our learning behaviours) for trying their best and not giving up!