Childwall Abbey School is delighted to announce that we have been awarded the ‘Liverpool Counts’ silver quality mark.
‘Liverpool Counts’ is the launch of a new quality mark to recognise excellent practice in schools and other education establishments as part of a drive to improve attainment in mathematics at all levels in education.
The aims of the quality mark are to:
- raise standards in mathematics and numeracy with fun and joy of number at its heart.
- challenge perceptions and change attitudes towards numeracy and mathematics.
- raise the profile of numeracy using activities, events and resources based on real-life.
- bring relevance to numeracy through problem solving demonstrating it is an essential skill.
We are also aiming to achieve the gold quality mark starting with the new school term in September.
How we achieved the silver quality mark
1. Numeracy Life Skills
There are four Numeracy life skills we have decided to focus on. We think about these in all our subjects. The four life skills have been chosen because they are very relevant to our everyday lives.
2. Numeracy Morning
Every Thursday morning a 30 minute session at the start of the day gives an opportunity for form groups to enjoy some fun numeracy activities together.
Here are some useful links for you to try at home or in class:
3. Weekly Maths Challenge.
On Monday mornings the whole school is set an interesting ‘Maths Challenge’. This can take many forms, such as Sodoku, problem solving and estimation. Pupils are encouraged to just “have a go” and enjoy trying to find the answer. Rewards are given for effort as well as for success.
This weeks Maths Challenge can be found here.
4. Practical Maths Lessons
This year we introduced “Practical Maths Lessons” to our timetable. All classes except Year 11 now have one lesson a week dedicated to “Practical Maths”. These lessons encourage pupils to think about how Maths is used in “real life” situations. The emphasis of these lessons is enjoyment and many of the activities are chosen by the pupils themselves. Pupils are also given the opportunity to develop there social skills through “Practical Maths”. This can be in the form of planning and budgeting as well as organising the lessons based on time, the amount of pupils in the class and the equipment available.
5. Numeracy Boxes
We now have a “Numeracy Box” in every working area of our school. This box contains different mathematical resources for pupils to use for numeracy problems that occur in all subjects. Different subject areas have populated their numeracy boxes with more subject specific numeracy equipment. e.g weighing scales in food technology. The Numeracy box gives our pupils a direct area for them to go to in every classroom when they are faced with a numeracy problem.