Maths

At The Mallard Academy, we believe it is vital to equip children with the mathematical skills required to operate in an increasingly complex and technologically-driven society. 

Our curriculum is designed to ensure our children:

  • Become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics.
  • Develop conceptual understanding and the ability to recall and apply knowledge rapidly.
  • Learn to confidently reason and problem solve by applying mathematics to a variety of increasingly complex problems.
  • Build upon their knowledge and understanding from Reception to Year 6.
  • Develop resilience that enables them to reason and problem solve with increased confidence.

At The Mallard Academy, we use the White Rose scheme for Years 1 to 6 to plan high quality, adaptive and interactive lessons, which ensure continuous progression, small step learning and challenge for all learners. Children are introduced to a range of models and images to support them in understanding the concepts of different operations through variation and representation. This allows children to build confidence and fluency in mathematical knowledge, concepts and skills leading to automaticity.

Research shows that all children, when introduced to a new concept, should have the opportunity to build competency by following the Concrete Pictorial Abstract (CPA) approach. This features throughout our schemes of learning.

  • Concrete - Children should have the opportunity to work with physical objects/concrete resources, in order to bring the maths to life and to build understanding of what they are doing.
  • Pictorial - Alongside concrete resources, children should work with pictorial representations, making links to the concrete. Visualising a problem in this way can help children to reason and to solve problems.
  • Abstract - With the support of both the concrete and pictorial representations, children can develop their understanding of abstract methods.

We understand the importance of basic skills as a foundation for all Maths teaching and build fundamental skills, arithmetic and automaticity into our daily teaching. We also understand the need for children to be able to verbalise their understanding and explain their reasoning coherently.