What happens at the start of Year 8?

Students in Year 8 will continue to be in tiered groups, but with many parallel classes, giving all students the opportunity to be challenged at a high level. The groups are reviewed periodically in order to maximise the students’ progress.

What do students learn?

Students continue to follow the White Rose Maths scheme in Year 8. The curriculum continues to offer carefully considered sequential learning in small steps, that has been coupled with rigorous low stakes formative assessment and summative assessments in order to ensure knowledge is not just encountered but embedded in student’s long term memory.

The lessons involve problem-solving, fluency and reasoning aspects, which are proven to be essential skills for students to develop. Within this, students are given strategies to approach problem-solving questions, for example using bar modelling. There are also real-life contextualised questions to help students explore how their mathematical progression can be used in wider contexts.

What content is covered?

• Ratio and scale
• Multiplicative change
• Multiplying and dividing fractions
• Working in the Cartesian plane
• Representing data
• Tables and probability
• Brackets, equations and inequalities
• Sequences
• Indices
• Fractions and percentages
• Standard index form
• Number sense
• Angles in parallel lines and polygons
• Area of trapezia and circles
• Line symmetry and reflection
• The data handling cycle
• Measures of location

Each chapter is made up of a number of interconnected small steps. These can be found here.

What can you do to help?

The White Rose Maths scheme has many home learning videos that you can watch at home along with the students. These work parallel to the structure of our lessons. They can be found here.

Each student also has a login to the Sparx Maths website. This is used for weekly homeworks, but is also a very useful tool for them to enhance their skills and plug gaps in knowledge. It is recommended that students log in to this on a regular basis.

Students use their normal school login details to login to Sparx.

What do we do to help?

Students have nine lessons of Maths lessons per fortnight. Students are also offered additional support and are always encouraged to speak to their teachers if they have any questions and/or require further help. Homework is set on a weekly basis and this will be on the Sparx Maths website. This homework is set at their own level of difficulty, based on their own previous work. It offers a section on bespoke consolidation of previous topics, as well as practice on the most recent topics.