Curriculum: Mathematics

River Gum Primary School has a whole school approach to Mathematics implementing a guaranteed and viable Mathematics curriculum through consistency in teacher practice and focus on ensuring each student is able to access success in Mathematics through a range of personalised and differentiated tasks at their level.

All lessons follow a whole school Mathematics Instructional Model to ensure all students experience a similar and effective delivery of Mathematics.

River Gum Primary School’s focus on Professor Dianne Siemon’s ‘Big Ideas’ in Number assists teachers to target individual learners and create engaging, practical lessons.

The ‘Big Ideas’ are mathematics skills that identify the key learning which should expected to be in place by the end of key levels in school to progress learning. In primary school, we focus on just four of these Big Numeracy Ideas: Trust the count, place value, multiplicative thinking and partitioning, The Assessment for Common Misunderstandings and Scaffolding Numeracy in the Middle Years assessment tools together with the Victorian Curriculum and other school data sets inform this approach. River Gum Primary School teachers use these ‘Big Ideas’ to determine where their students are at in their thinking around number and numeracy and identify gaps in their learning which may need revisiting.

Teachers meet weekly to discuss student progress and plan differentiated and personalised Mathematics tasks based on student point of need.

Students engage with the ‘Big Ideas’ through authentic contexts using the proficiencies of Understanding, Fluency, Problem Solving and Reasoning, which are fundamental to learning mathematics and working mathematically.

Students participate in "real world" maths through authentic tasks that are meaningful, are targeted at their age, interest levels and experience. These authentic tasks are open and accessible and can add value to a student's learning, no matter what their stage of learning. They also allow students to be collaborative, working with other students, having discussions and sharing their mathematical knowledge and thinking.

Parents and students can view student work on Seesaw portfolios, in classrooms or on display boards, which our school community can also view.