Mathematics
Hello, I’m Mrs Fleming and I’m the Maths lead at Sherdley Primary School. I have been the Maths lead since September 2021 but have previously led Design Technology and English within the school.
I completed my MAST (Maths Specialist Teacher Course) training at Edge Hill University several years ago, and am passionate about the teaching and learning of Maths.
Maths is important because we all use the skills in ‘real life’- from telling the time; paying for goods in a shop or measuring how much wallpaper or flooring we may need when decorating.
Looking through the children’s books and seeing the progress they have made during the year in areas such as: place value, the 4 operations, shape and measures is a delight to see, especially seeing their confidence grow when answering reasoning and problem solving questions.
I support our teachers by attending Mastery courses with our Maths Hub and delivering training to our school staff. Ensuring that staff have the resources they need to teach Maths ensures that children can learn effectively. Our pupils love sharing their Maths work with me and are keen to talk about their work.
If you would like to talk about Maths at Sherdley Primary, please contact me.
Learning times tables off by heart is crucial to all of our children from Year 2 through to Year 6. All of our children sit the MTC in June of Year 4, where they are expected to answer 25 multiplication questions- each one in less than 6 seconds. This means that they need to ‘know’ their times tables to 12×12 as there is no time to work out the answers. As part of their weekly homework, all the children are expected to access TTRockstars or Numbots (for our younger children). The more that the children practise their times tables, the more confident and faster they will become.
Knowing their times tables helps the children with long multiplication and division and working out fractions, decimals and percentages. These are vital skills to enable the children to access the maths curriculum, and prepare them for the expectations of High School.
If you need your child’s login for TTRockstars or Numbots, please speak to your child’s class teacher.
As part of ‘Black History Month’ in October, my Year 2 class found out about Katherine Johnson, who was a key Mathematician working to help NASA put astronauts on the moon. Some of their work is shown in the photographs below.
Here are some links to useful Maths websites to help your child at home:
https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/hit-the-button A great game for practising times tables recall
There is a super free maths app from White Rose called ‘1 minute maths’. It covers much of the number work that we teach throughout the school and the aim is to answer as many questions as you can in a minute.
