Maths Curriculum

Maths at Styal Primary School

At Styal, we help all children develop the skills necessary to use Maths as part of their everyday lives. We want our children to enjoy Maths and be confident with it.

All of our classes start their morning with a fluency activity. This allows children the time to practise previously taught skills. In Key Stage Two, the four operations are covered every week:

Monday – Addition

Tuesday – Subtraction

Wednesday – Multiplication

Thursday – Division

Reception and Key Stage One use the time to embed number understanding and formation until specific skills are introduced. 

We deliver mixed-age lessons that are accessible to all in our community and are engaging, whilst following Power Maths which is approved by the Department of Education. Power Maths is an interactive, whole-class teaching model. It encourages precise mathematical language and allows children to deepen their understanding as far as they can. By working hard, all children can achieve.

We teach skills through context, providing purpose and meaning, making mathematical experiences enjoyable, practical, relevant and realistic. This helps children to develop a positive attitude towards Maths and develop the ability to work independently with confidence in their work.

Our lessons start with ‘Discover’, giving children appealing real-life scenarios stimulate curiosity, helping children to identify the maths problem and discover patterns and relationships for themselves.

We incorporate sustained levels of challenge through varied and high-quality activities with a focus on fluency, reasoning and problem solving. Pupils are required to explore maths in depth, using mathematical vocabulary to reason and explain their workings.

After working as a class, children work in partners before moving on to independent work. All children are supported to understand the Maths taking place and achieve.

Times Tables RockStars

Times Table Rock Stars (TTRS) is a fun and challenging programme designed to help your child/children to master the times tables! To be a Times Table Rock Star you need to answer any multiplication fact up to 12×12 in less than 3 seconds!

World famous rock musicians are the best at what they do because they've spent hours practising guitar chords, writing music or playing on the drums. It's just the same with times tables – all Times Table Rock Stars need to practise and practise and practise. It's absolutely essential that your child does a little bit of times table practice every night. In our experience, short bursts of practise on a daily basis are more effective than spending hours once a week.

TTRS has a clever algorithm set behind the scenes that moves each child onto the next level when they are confident with the questions. It looks for speed and accuracy. Incorrect answers are always immediately corrected in front of the pupil so that they start to associate the correct answer to every question.

More than that, the clever code behind the scenes works out which times tables facts each pupil is consistently taking longer to answer and then it gradually starts to present these facts more frequently until pupils have mastered them.

It will also ask related division questions 20% of the time in order to reinforce division facts.

Challenges are set with classes and across the school to see who can be the quickest Rockstar. Children can individually challenge each other and even their teachers!

The world record for the fastest time is 0.31 seconds! That is 3 questions in 1 second. Watch it here and see if you can beat it...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_t9inv79i18

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