Maths

Maths at Ormiston South Parade Academy

At Ormiston South Parade our aim is for pupils to know and understand the purpose, relevance and importance of mathematics in everyday life. Our intention is for every child to be number confident and to be motivated by an exciting and meaningful maths curriculum.

We follow Effective Maths, this is a Shanghai- style mastery approach to the teaching of mathematics. It is a comprehensive framework for ensuring high quality maths teaching.

The features that comprise Effective Maths are:

  • Mastery
  • Procedural and conceptual understanding
  • Variation
  • Mathematical patterns, relationships and connections

Lesson Structure

Instructional Routines:

Slick instructions are essential for effective whole class teaching. Instructional routines are systematic procedures used for introducing/practising information, strategies, skills or vocabulary. Instructional routines allow pace to be brisk but not frantic; children to participate with enthusiasm and speak in unison.

Blue/Green partners:

Partner work is an essential component of mastery teaching. It needs to be very tightly managed to ensure equality of participation, therefore ensuring all children make progress.  When one partner is doing a task, the role of the other partner is to be the teacher and correct any mistakes made, praises their partner, ask them to explain why/how they know.

Tell Yourself!

Tell yourself follows whole class teaching and partner practice. Children cover their mouths and answer questions from the board whilst the teacher moves around the room listening to individual children’s responses. Music is played. The purpose of the music is to provide some background noise so that it is harder for children to copy what another child is saying. The purpose of Tell Yourself is to assess individual children’s responses: by this stage of the lesson sequence we have seen their responses in a whole class context, with a partner- but what can they do on their own? What is their level of mastery?

Amaze Me!

This part of the lesson deliberately seeks to promote depth by encouraging children to look at what they’ve just been doing in a different way. Encouraging children to provide slick answers to these questions is a core part of the teacher’s role in this part of the lesson. Teachers will model the kind of responses they expect from the children in precise and unambiguous language. Children are encouraged to stand up when they answer individual questions.

To find out more about Effective Maths follow the link: https://www.effectivemaths.com/