Mathematics

Our vision: At Cannon Lane, we strive to create confident and fluent mathematicians, who can reason and are able to apply their knowledge to solving problems in real life contexts.

Mathematics at Cannon Lane Primary School

Curriculum

Our mathematics curriculum is organised into a logical progression of topics over a year. We spend time ensuring that children build strong foundations in their number skills, ensuring that they are ready to build on their knowledge and skills. 

Mastery

Following a mastery approach to mathematics, means that children are more likely to secure a deep, long-term and flexible understanding of the subject. Children's chances of success are increased if they develop deep and lasting understanding of mathematical methods and concepts. Teachers use the CPA (concrete, pictorial, abstract) approach in their teaching to support this deep learning. A focus is put on to the use concrete materials and visual representations in lessons to represent a concept, alongside the more abstract numbers and symbols. 

Fluency

A large part of our mathematics lessons are devoted to giving children opportunities to become more fluent in the concepts that they have been taught. Children make use of concrete materials and visual representations to practise learning new facts and procedures. The aim is for all children to be able to recall key facts quickly and efficiently, so that they can use them to access more complex mathematics. 

Subitising

In Reception and KS1, children are taught the skill of subitising. Research shows that if children have to rely on counting as a strategy, it can slow them down and they are more likely to make errors. For this reason, we teach children how to say how many they can see without counting. This is usually practised by showing children images of dots or objects organised in a logical way. Subitising is most efficient with numbers up to 20.

Maths Oracy

In order to gain a deeper understanding of a concept, children need to be able to explain it. This is why we provide lots of opportunities in lessons for children to talk about their learning and to justify their working out and ideas. Children will work with talk partners for example, to explain whether a mathematical statement is true or false. Children are taught explicitly to use key mathematical vocabulary in their explanations.

Reasoning

When children are fluent in a mathematical concept, they will be encouraged to think more deeply and apply it to solving problems and reasoning. They use concrete materials and pictures alongside numerals and signs, to show their working out and explain their thinking.