At Sandhurst Primary School, teaching through White Rose, we adopt the “ping-pong” approach where the teacher leads back and forth interaction including questioning, short tasks, explanation, demonstration and discussion. Each individual lesson (small step) is structured and sequenced as follows:

1. Flashback 4 - Retrieval: Flashback 4 is a series of quick questions covering something from the previous lesson, last week and then topics from earlier in the year or, in some cases, last year!
2. Get Ready – Here is your starter: The starters are designed to recap learning from previous lessons in the block or recap key knowledge that is needed for the upcoming lesson.
3. Let’s Learn –Get Ready for today’s new learning: Introduces and explores the key concept for the lesson together with worked examples to complete as a whole class.
4. Our Turn: This section allows the teacher to guide pupils through a specific part of the learning for the lesson. This is an opportunity for teachers to demonstrate metacognition by explaining their process of completing a task. These tasks include are a variety of fluency, reasoning and problem-solving questions to ensure that all pupils are exposed to all elements of the national curriculum.
5. Your turn: Pupils now apply the whole class teaching to their independent work.
6. Review: How did you do? As a whole class, review the answers and discuss approaches/
7. As part of our “ping-pong” approach to teaching maths, steps 4-6 are the repeated as many times as required.
8. Think Pink – consolidation challenge: As a class, children draw upon their learning from the lesson to solve and complete the “Think Pink” challenge.

Following our White Rose Curriculum, we use quality-assured lesson resources, teaching slides, sentence stems and assessments to further support children’s developing mathematical skills.

Using White Rose maths, each year is split into three terms: Autumn, Spring and Summer. Each term is divided into three to six blocks of up to 15 sessions (small steps) in each.

Our White Rose curriculum provides opportunities to see what knowledge children have retained and what skills they have mastered through clear curriculum endpoints which help teachers to make judgments about each child’s progress and attainment – please see White Rose National Curriculum Progression document for these end points. Typically, at the end of each unit, children will complete an assessment that takes the form of a short assessment. This provides a summative insight that is used alongside outcomes and pupil voice to assess what has been learned. We do also have three formative assessment points throughout the year too.

Aspirations for the future

We want our pupils to develop a love for mathematics and as a result remind them, if they continue to aim high, as a mathematician they could become an astronaut, a web developer, an engineer, a games creator an architect and many other exciting professions!