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Maths

Hamilton Mastery and Blocking

By Ruth Merttens - 16 Sep 2018

Achieving Maths Mastery in Your Class

What does 'mastery' actually mean? How do we know where children are on their journey towards it? What are the aspects of understanding that enable children to get to mastery? How can you use Hamilton to enable your children to master their age-related expectations and go on to work at further depth?

Matrix for Mastery

Matrix for mastery - skills grid

Mastery is a complex aim. It is not as simple as being able to mimic a particular procedure; there are both skills and metaskills involved.

Hamilton's Maths Mastery Grid shows you the pedagogical intervention required to teach maths effectively and for children to acquire the necessary skills concepts and reasoning abilities. The grid can also be used to structure assessment for mastery.

Hamilton's blocks cover both the skills and the meta-skills that facilitate both procedural fluency and conceptual understanding.

Mastery is not new to Hamilton - and we can help your children achieve it.

All Hamilton planning materials are focussed on mastery - we always teach and provide learning experiences in the three required areas:

  1. underpinning children's conceptual understanding through the development of a consistent set of images and models;
  2. engendering procedural fluency by suitable activities and practice;
  3. providing investigations and frequent opportunities for reasoning and problem-solving both within the weekly plans and also alongside them.

You can rely on Hamilton's methodological consistency and child-friendly pedagogy to teach maths to the wide variety of children in your class.

Tailor your teaching to achieve Mastery

Whatever approach you are taking to teaching for maths mastery, Hamilton's maths blocks offer rigorous pedagogy, progression and consistent development of models. Blocks cover a term's worth of objectives for a maths area in the National Curriculum for England. Each of the constituent units gives you everything you need to teach a particular maths objective.

  • Teaching PowerPoints give you an an entire ready-to-use taught lesson for your white board, include practice sheets for the main body of the class.
  • Problem solving and investigative activities give children the opportunity to develop the metaskills that they need to go beyond rote learning and really understand the maths.
  • Reasoning questions provide quick activities that enable you to assess Mastery unit by unit as you teach.

Each unit also includes starters, group activities, fully differentiated practice sheets and extra support for those children that need a boost in order to access the objectives.

Explore our Maths Planning: