Maths

How to help your child in Maths

We know parents want to be involved in their child’s learning and so we have created this area of the website to share with parents the key skills that will really help your child be a successful maths learner. We don’t expect parents to teach pupils at home, but you can support them in understanding what we teach in school. Keeping it simple and going over key learning is the best way for parents to support their child, rather than trying to keep up and match what is happening in the classroom.

Keeping it simple. Key Learning you can support at home.

Pupils in Early Years = Recognising numbers and quantities and learning to count.
Pupils in Key Stage 1 (Year 1 and 2) = Learning number bonds to 10, 20 and 100.
Pupils in Key Stage 2 = Learning all their times table facts by heart.

Further Key Skills

Working on these key skills is a priority at school but can also be practised at home. Feel free to speak to your child’s class teacher if you have any questions. Click the link for your child’s year group to see more key skills they will be learning this year in Maths:

Nursery | Reception | Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 | Year 4 | Year 5 | Year 6

Websites to Support Your Child

Number Blocks – For children in the Early Years and Year 1. Games, songs, educational videos and puzzles.

Numbots – Most appropriate for older Reception students and pupils in Year 1 up to Year 4. Excellent website, every pupil is given a log in to be able to access.

My Maths – Reception upwards. Students also have a log in to access My Maths. This site covers a range of topics and different tasks are often set for homework.

Times Tables Rock Stars – For Year 2 upwards. The same login for Numbots can be used to access TT Rock Stars.. In Year 2 pupils need to focus solely on learning their 2, 5 and 10 times tables and this is what teachers will set to practise. Pupils in Year 3, 4, 5 and 6 should continue to use this website regularly. Year 4 pupils can regularly practise Soundcheck to prepare for their Multiplication Tables Check.

Hit the Button – Learning Number Bonds and Doubles is appropriate for pupils in Key Stage One. Working on times tables, division and square numbers supports pupils in Key Stage Two.

As a school we also use Numbersensemaths -Some parts of this website are free for you to explore.

Sneak a peek into lessons

Reception

In term 2 in Reception students learn about estimating and measuring. They make choices about which classroom items they would use to measure different things. Students learn by trying and working together.

Year 1

Learning number bonds in Year 1 is a key part of learning which helps pupils throughout the rest of primary school. They work on pulling numbers apart and putting them together in lots of different ways.

Year 2

Year 2 is the first year students learn explicitly about multiplication. Here they could count the marshmallows one by one, they could add 5 + 5 + 5 OR, as they learn in this lesson, they can use multiplication to solve 3 x 5 and find 15 marshmallows. Pupils are expected to leave Year 2 knowing their 2, 5 and 10 times tables.

Year 3

After starting the year with a big emphasis on learning and understanding place value of 3 digit numbers, pupils in Year 3 need to apply this understanding to addition and subtraction problems. Understanding that 2 hundreds plus 3 hundreds makes 5 hundreds just as 2 ones and 3 ones makes 5 ones can help some of these “big number” addition and subtraction problems seem less scary.

Year 4

In this Year 4 lesson pupils already know how to write fractions. Some of the learning in Year 4 fractions is designed to support pupils’ future learning of decimals. Here pupils can explore how much cake each of these 3 people took and the different ways this can be represented.

Year 5

Year 5 dives deeply into decimal numbers. Pupils know about tenths and hundredths but they begin to explore thousandths. The possible solutions to this problem could take an entire lesson to explore! Once pupils start to realise the patterns and relationships between the numbers, an understanding of decimal numbers will often click into place.

Year 6

Students in Year 6 explore algebra for the first time. In this lesson pupils can start to build the pattern using concrete materials or a pictorial representation and try to show what they think the next two rectangles in the sequence would look like. Can they explain their suggestions? Will the pattern become a square at any point?

Journaling in Maths

Do you want to understand what students and teachers mean when they talk about journaling? Please click on the link to view examples of how journaling progresses in maths from year 1 to year 6.

Pupil Corner – Hear from the pupils themselves.

.