Helping at Home

Providing support to your child's learning at home can be really valuable in reinforcing what they have learnt at school.  Each week activities will be sent home which are related to what your child has been learning in school.

Many of you may be worried that you will teach your children the 'wrong' way of calculating because the strategies we use today are in many cases different and slightly alien to those that many of you were taught at school.  We strongly believe that the best thing that parents and carers can do for children is to have a positive attitude towards maths. It might be that teaching methods or the ways that you solve a problem are different but numbers haven't changed; it's just we might use different way of doing things!  Our calculations policy can be found under the policies tab.

At World's End we aim to provide you with lots of useful tips and information for supporting your child's learning in maths.  We have included various ideas and suggestions for maths activities that you can enjoy doing with your child in the world away from school.

Please also remember to check out the explanatory videos for some of the strategies that we teach under the calculations tab.

Maths Workshops

Each Year we invite parents in for INSPIRE workshops.  These help you to the understand how maths is taught in the class that your child is in as well as the expectations for the year band.  You also get to work alongside your child doing lots of fun activities that you can continue to do at home. 

Our Mission to the Milky Way

To develop your child’s fluency and mental maths skills, we have  redesigned our KIRFs (Key Instant Recall Facts) throughout school.  They are designed to support the  development of mental maths skills that underpin much of the maths work in our school. They are particularly useful when adding, subtracting, multiplying or dividing. They contain number facts such as number bonds and times tables that need constant practise and rehearsal, so children can recall them quickly and accurately.   The aim is to develop children’s fluency in mathematics in order to create competent and confident mathematicians. To achieve this, we will be focusing on children learning Key Instant Recall Facts (KIRFs). These are a set of key objectives for each year group which align with the National Curriculum and help form a solid foundation for children to be successful.  Over their time at our school, we believe that - if the KIRFs are developed fully, children will be more confident with number work, understand its relevance, and be able to access the curriculum much more easily. They will be able to apply what they have learnt to a wide range of problems that confront us regularly.

 Each half term, children will focus on a Key Instant Recall Fact (KIRF) to practise and learn at home for the half term. They will also be available on our school website under the maths section and each child will receive a copy to keep at home.

The KIRFs include practical ideas to assist your child in grasping the key facts and contain helpful suggestions of ways in which you could make this learning interesting and relevant. They are not designed to be a time-consuming task and can be practised anywhere – in the car, walking to school, etc. Regular practice - little and often – helps children to retain these facts and keep their skills sharp. Throughout the half term, the KIRFs will also be practised in school and your child’s teacher will assess whether they have been retained.

We do hope that you enjoy learning these with your child and thank you once again for your continuing  support.  It really does make a  difference to your child.