"A person who never made a mistake, never tried anything new"
Albert Einstein
At Oatlands Infant School we encourage risk-taking within our maths curriculum. We firmly believe that maths enables our children to explore and try new ideas without the fear of failure. The children are encouraged to delve deeper into their understanding of maths and how it relates to the world around them.
You can find out more about our maths curriculum and teaching via the PowerPoint PDF below, which was presented to parents and carers at the maths morning in January 2025:
Maths Rocks Day is an annual day where we all dress up as Rock Stars and celebrate the power of maths and music to inspire and build up our confidence and self-esteem.
On this special day, Rock Kidz visit and we get to rock out to two amazing shows as well as participating in a host of exciting maths themed activities.
Every year in November, we celebrate maths week across school to further enthuse children with a love of maths. We promote maths through other curriculum areas to show how maths is everywhere in our every day lives.
In Reception, we use Mastering Number to develop confidence with number, early number sense and automaticity. The Early Learning Goals aim to ensure that:
Numbers
In Key Stage 1 we follow the National Curriculum for maths using the White Rose Scheme of learning to support a well embedded mastery approach. This approach encourages and allows all children to work together on the same topic so that all children are able to gain a deeper understanding and proficiency in maths.
The National Curriculum aims to ensure that all pupils :
At Oatlands Infant School, we adopt a knowledge and mastery approach to Mathematics to encourage children to become resilient, confident problem-solvers. We believe that Maths enables us to nurture many other aspects of our children’s lives. It prevents chaos, makes our lives more orderly, and gives us the power of reasoning and creativity, as well as critical thinking and problem-solving abilities. These values guide our ideas about the curriculum and inspire our children with a sense of purpose, engagement and excitement.
During lessons, children are challenged through a variety of high-quality, purposeful activities where they show their workings using concrete resources before establishing more formal ways of representing their understanding. We aim for children to use the appropriate vocabulary and reasoning skills when explaining their methods in order to apply their skills in real-life contexts and become confident mathematical thinkers.
We recently held mastering number parent workshops for reception children and their parents in school. If you would like any more information on these, please contact your child's class teacher.