Rethinking the structure of the Year 1 maths curriculum
This article was written to accompany the launch of the EEF report 'Improving Mathematics in the Early Years and Key Stage 1' and the original blog was published on the Research Schools website. This slightly longer version includes a bit more detail on some of the routines we have been using.
We've found that much of the Year 1 number curriculum can be covered through everyday routines, and in fact is better done this way because of the 'little and often' reinforcement it offers to skills such as fluent counting. This means that we have a lot more of the main maths lessons with a number focus to teach subitising, quantity recognition and partitioning, leading into adding and subtracting within ten, and 'ten and a bit' teens numbers. We also do lots of space, shape and measures learning in our main maths lessons. Some other schools have made similar moves and integrated a lot of our materials into their whole class maths lessons. However other schools prefer keeping their number facts teaching in a separate daily session similar to a phonics session.
