At Nether Stowey, we teach maths with principles of Mastery at its heart. This means, we value children understanding numbers, the number system and how maths works. We require them to be able to explain their methods, and choose the most efficient from a range of possibilities. We activiely avoid teaching abstract methods with no underlying knowledge of how or why it might work. We do this because to become high-level mathematicians, people need depth of understanding. If they purely learn abstarct methods, they will be unaware if they make mistakes, and certainly unaware of how to correct the mistakes, if they are informed of them.
A major part of this approach is including three stages within their learning: concrete, pictorial and then abstract.
We also teach a high level of mathemtical vocabulary and encourage full sentence answers and explanations to questions, often through the guidance of a sentence stem.