Learning at Home - Maths

Whatever approach to maths you are using at home, have fun with it. Learning from home is not always easy, so do what you can and remember that little and often really can make a huge amount of difference. Teachers have put lots of useful links for each age group on the class pages, but here is some further guidance to support you and your children to develop their maths skills at home.

Keeping maths skills topped up will really help children when they return to school. The easiest way to do this is by spending a little time each day on DoodleMaths. As little as 20 mins a day will make all the difference. DoodleMaths gives children a good workout across all areas of maths, including number, shape and measures. It is specially designed to assess each child’s next steps in learning. If you feel the questions are getting too tricky, contact their class teacher and we can reset their account to the correct level again. (On this note, remember any help that you give them may increase the difficulty of these questions). Teachers monitor their class’s activity on DoodleMaths weekly, so it is wonderful for us to see that so many of our children are using it regularly. Teachers are also setting challenges called ‘extras’ for their class to keep key skills topped up, which are also monitored weekly.

During the summer term, we will be announcing the Top Doodling class, which is awarded for team effort, each Friday on our website. So come on boys and girls, get Doodling!

At school we spend a lot of time learning and rehearsing our fluency facts, such as number bonds and multiplication tables. Being able to draw on these facts quickly and easily makes a huge difference to children’s confidence and mathematical development. There are lots of ways children can continue to develop these skills whilst learning from home: Doodle Tables, Times Tables Rock Stars and Hit the Button. Little and often always works best and remember to learn the facts first by lots of chanting out loud with the answers in front of you, before having a go at the testing on these apps. If you are not sure of your login details for any of these, simply contact your class teacher and they will be able to help. https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/hit-the-button  https://www.topmarks.co.uk/Search.aspx?q=number+bonds 

For those of you who would like some more structured support with maths teaching, White Rose have produced a series of online lessons for each year group to support working from home throughout the summer term. The lessons are interactive and many have supporting resources which you can printed off if you wish. Also, can be worked through at your own pace to suit what time you have available. White Rose https://whiterosemaths.com/homelearning/ 

Often when we think of maths, we think about learning maths at school and practising our tables and sums, but in truth, maths is all around us and is of course taught because it is an important life skill that we sometimes use without being fully aware of it. Whilst children are learning at home we have a great opportunity to show them this. This can be done through many activities such as: measuring and calculating with cooking or DIY and by focusing on shape or symmetry if you are getting creative with art and crafts. There are also lots of ideas for developing maths with younger children already on our school website in the EYFS section of our Useful Websites and Apps page.

Boys and girls, moms and dads, thank you for all the effort you have put in already. Above all else we want you all to be safe and happy and make the very best of these challenging times. One day it will all return to normal again, so if we can have a little bit of regular learning focus before then, it will really help us to all prepare for that day.