Thatcham Park Primary School

Find our maths curriculum here.

Maths at Thatcham Park is based around the 3 main aims of the new curriculum. This 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 pupils have conceptual understanding and are able to recall and apply their knowledge rapidly and accurately to problems.

* 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 Thatcham Park, we teach maths in units of learning which incorporate different domains which build to a large scale problem to be solved by the children. It is our aim to equip children with the skills they need to break into rich and sophisticated problems whilst explaining and justifying their working. We use a problem based approach in which children select their own level of learning to ensure challenge. The government recommends that ‘pupils who grasp concepts rapidly should be challenged through being offered rich and sophisticated problems before any acceleration through new content.’ As such, we follow a calculation policy in each year of the school to ensure a progression in learning of calculation methods and to provide a basis on which to build problems and challenges.  Throughout the school, we use ‘Table Mountain’ to allow us to relentlessly pursue fluency to ensure our children have flexible and rapid recall of number facts.