Big Maths is a teaching method created by Ben Harding that embraces the logical nature of maths, translating it into simple Steps and Progress Drives. This makes progress easy and fun for both children and teachers giving all pupils the opportunity to achieve.

Other strategies approach the teaching of maths in the ‘traditional way’; giving teachers broad curriculum statements with little accurate guidance on how to get pupils there. In Big Maths there is great detail built into the system that allows all teachers to experience high subject knowledge and teacher expertise, therefore getting the chronology of the maths journey right for each child.

Primary Mathematics is one big interconnected subject. When we come to teach mathematics to children we break it down into very small manageable steps, teach each step in isolation, and then put it back together again. We are connecting each step to related surrounding steps as we go and showing the children how to use and apply existing skills and knowledge in new situations as well as developing the reasoning to justify this.

Big Maths begins with a model of numeracy development that provides an innovative and highly effective way of looking at the Primary Mathematics curriculum. It cashes in on the nature of maths, using CLIC as a chronological framework for securing basic skills and on the logical steps of progression that sit naturally in mathematical progression, which we call Progress Drives.

Children acquire the basic skills of Mathematics through the chronology of CLIC. When we look at Core Numeracy in more detail we see that it has a 4 stage process to it:

Counting
children learn to count and to ‘count on’.

Learn Its
children then short-cut this counting by recalling their ‘counting on’ as facts.

It’s Nothing New
children then ‘swap the thing’ to realise that the counting fact, or ‘Learn It’, can be applied to any object, amount or unit of measure.

Calculation
the previous 3 phases are combined to provide a calculation structure.