Maths
In St. Patrick’s, we believe that mathematics is a tool for life. It is an essential life skill that is used throughout our daily lives, but is also a powerful tool that can help us to understand and change the world. We aim to ensure that every child leaves school with high standards of numeracy as well as literacy, so that they have the best chance of succeeding in the modern world. Throughout our school community, we strive to promote a philosophy of ‘Numeracy for Life’ through our mathematical teaching and learning, giving pupils opportunities to solve problems and reason mathematically in real-life contexts, and making enriching mathematical links between all areas of the curriculum, future career choices, and real life events and situations. This year, we are proud to be participating once more in the Liverpool Counts Quality Mark and we are working towards retaining our Gold Award status.
We aim to ensure that all pupils:
‐ become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics, including through varied and frequent practice with increasingly complex problems over time, so that pupils have conceptual understanding and are able to recall and apply their knowledge rapidly and accurately to problems
‐ reason mathematically by following a line of enquiry, conjecturing relationships and generalisations, and developing an argument, justification or proof using mathematical language
‐ can solve problems by applying their mathematics to a variety of routine and non-routine problems with increasing sophistication, including breaking down problems into a series of simpler steps and persevering in seeking solutions.
In our teaching of mathematics at St Patrick’s, we aim to:
· Inculcate an enjoyment and love of maths.
· Promote a philosophy of ‘Numeracy for Life’ through our mathematical teaching and learning.
· Enable pupils to have opportunities for mathematical thinking and discussion.
· Provide opportunities for pupils to demonstrate and use their mathematics.
· Provide a role-model by using maths for practical purposes, and organisational and administrative tasks.
· Give pupils opportunities to use maths in everyday situations and a problem-solving context.
· Help pupils to understand that mathematics is a powerful tool for communication.
· Instil confidence in using mathematics.
· Help pupils recognise that mathematics is a search for pattern and relationship.
· Instil a fascination for mathematics and the manipulation of numbers.
· Encourage pupils to take responsibility for their own learning.
“Mathematics is the most beautiful and most powerful creation of the human spirit.” – Stefan Banach, mathematician
“There should be no such thing as boring mathematics.” – Edsger Dijkstra, computer scientist
“Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics.” – Dean Schlicter, mathematician