Maths

Here at Anstey, we strive to provide children with a stimulating and fulfilling Maths curriculum, one that helps guide them as learners and pushes them to reach their full potential. We know that Maths will play an important part in their lives and the skills we teach them in the classroom will potentially have a huge impact on their futures in the real world.

Our ‘Concrete, Pictorial and Abstract’ approach towards the Maths curriculum allows children to engage with new learning in various stages, building up their confidence as they progress onto more complex tasks. This approach is used consistently from Year 3 to Year 6, giving students access to new learning based on their personal needs in every year group. No matter where they currently are in their personal learning journey – this approach gives them the tools and scaffolding they need to truly grasp and understand each topic within the Maths curriculum.

It starts with the Concrete stage: a place in the learning journey where physical resources are used to introduce a new concept. This gives children the opportunity to visualise a problem and practically use resources to help build their understanding. Often, children learn best when they can see or touch the learning, providing them with a solid foundation to build upon.

Next, they progress onto the Pictorial stage; where questions and concepts are represented through pictures and diagrams, moving children beyond the need for practical resources while still providing support through a visual aid. In this stage we encourage drawing the problem – in order to help remember the learning that took place during the Concrete stage.

Finally, once a child is confident in a mathematical concept they will progress into the Abstract phase; where numbers and letters will make up the majority of Maths questions and the children will need to use their strategies, knowledge and resilience to apply their learning to more complex questions.

Throughout this process, we intend to push children to apply their learning to real world contexts. Maths makes up a huge part of our lives and here at Anstey we want to use this within our lessons. The children will be exposed to a range fluency, reasoning and problem solving questions – all designed to boost their depth of understanding and apply their learning to a variety of situations they may come across as adults. By contextualising the children’s learning, we believe our students will become more engaged within lessons, resilient when tackling challenging problems and motivated to become expert mathematician