Students, even as young as kindergarten, are natural problem solvers (Carpenter et al., 2017). Even before they learn to count, they can make sense of mathematical problems and real- world situations (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 2022). Kindergartners can make sense of complex story problems, including Separate Start Unknown…

Let's say you are a Grades 3-5 teacher in search of an activity sheet on different fraction notations. A search in May 2022 on the popular resources sharing site TeachersPayTeachers (TpT) yielded 2,832 results, 105 of which were free. With so many options, how would you go about choosing a resource for your students? What would factor into your…

Foundation and Year 1/2 teachers at Saint Martin de Porres Primary School, a Catholic School in Laverton, Melbourne have been collaborating with a team of researchers from Monash University on a four-year project led by Professor Peter Sullivan and colleagues. The teachers have been trialling and implementing a series of lesson sequences as part…

Providing students the autonomy and choice to learn when productive struggle becomes unproductive is a core teaching belief in the author's classroom. The author teaches in a multiage classroom where he has 16 first- and second-grade students, ages 6, 7, and 8. Like other educators, he believes in the importance of productive struggle. The author…

This collaborative inquiry between an academic (James Russo) and two school-based practitioners (Jessie McCosh and Travis Hewish) explores student attitudes towards learning mathematics through problem solving in a medium sized primary school in regional Victoria.

The authors who are mathematics teacher educators, have found that classifying, composing, and transforming shapes (in particular, rotations and reflections) are areas of difficulty for adults as well as for children. However, these are also some of the most important geometric ideas. They are fundamental topics in the K-8 Geometry and Measurement…

For far too long, the United States has neglected and wasted an enormous amount of human potential--much of it among groups that have never been given the opportunities they deserve. We're talking about bright students, advanced learners, striving pupils, and those with high but untapped potential--especially those who are Black, Hispanic, Native…

Jill Cheeseman and Deborah Michels let us eavesdrop on a young child's attempt to solve a four-digit subtraction. In the process they describe the use of an empty number line as a tool for describing the calculation process. If you haven't tried using an empty number line, then the authors outline some compelling reasons for using empty number…

Standard 10 of the Common Core State Standards attends to students' capacity with complex text. This standard distinguishes the Common Core State Standards from previous standards documents. This article describes a process--the Text Complexity Multi-Index (TCMI)--that supports teachers in studying texts to support their students in…

In an increasingly fragmented and complex world, the author looks for ways to create greater coherence in the way schools go about their business. This article tracks the progress of a research project over the course of a year to find out what happens when teachers are given the opportunity to have a greater say about the work they do. The author…

In this conceptual essay, we offer rationales and evidence for critical components of a working model of text complexity for the early grades. In the first three sections of the article, we examine word-level, syntax-level, and discourse-level features of text, posing questions for future research. In the fourth section, we address elements of…

The WWC practice guide "Improving Reading Comprehension in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade" presents a set of evidence-based practices that teachers and other educators can use to successfully teach reading comprehension to young readers. The guide, developed by a panel of experts, presents a set of evidence-based practices that teachers…

The structure of the national numeracy strategy (1999) has ensured that whole-class teaching has become a significant feature of the primary mathematics lesson. It is the section of the lesson where children are introduced to new mathematics and therefore there is a need to make it effective. In this article, the author describes her small-scale…

In this technical report, the authors describe the development alternate forms of three types of early literacy measures as part of a comprehensive progress monitoring literacy assessment system developed in 2006 for use with students in Kindergarten through fourth grade. They begin with a brief overview of the two conceptual frameworks underlying…