The authors discuss the use of "real life" activities that are interesting to children in the teaching of measurement and number concepts. In this article, they present a series of lessons targeting volume and capacity that seamlessly incorporate genuine "real-life" experiences with practical mathematical applications. In…

The authors describe a lesson--"You Decide"--which challenges students but also provides opportunities for success for those who may struggle. They show how this lesson has been helpful for teachers in revealing some misconceptions that often exist in primary students' thinking. In this article, they share data on the apparent relative…

Building students' understanding of cardinality is fundamental for working with numbers and operations. Without these early mathematical foundations in place, students will fall behind. Consequently, it is imperative to build on students' strengths to address their weaknesses with the notion of cardinality.

In this article, James presents the Extended Hundreds Chart, a task he used with Year 6 students to explore their thinking about and representations of negative numbers.

Mathematics educators and researchers have advocated for the use of manipulatives to teach mathematics for decades. The purpose of this article is to provide illustrative uses of a readily available manipulative rather than a complete list. From an Australian perspective, Pop-it fidget toys can be used across the mathematics curriculum. This paper…

In providing a continued focus on tasks and activities that help to illustrate key ideas embedded in the new Australian Curriculum, this issue will focus on Number in the Number and Algebra strand. In this article Derek Hurrell provides a few tried and proven activities to develop place value understanding. These activities are provided for…

As a self described lesson collector, author Charles Lovett enjoys gathering "interesting" lessons and teasing them apart to find out what makes them "tick", particularly the pedagogy. He often wonders what decisions the teacher made that generated such an interesting and successful learning environment. Here he describes a…

This article presents an analysis of contextual tasks to support the development of counting in Foundation Year classrooms. The tasks allowed the students to engage in authentic and realistic number experiences on which to build their understandings of early number.

Making patterning the basis of mathematics investigations for an entire year produced unexpected results for Bruce Ferrington. A Year 2 class used the spatial tasks from the Pattern and Structure Mathematics Awareness Program (PASMAP) with a specific emphasis on patterning, to develop their thinking mathematically skills. The result was students…

Algebraic reasoning is foundational to all mathematical thinking. This is no less the case in the early years of school, where the capacity to recognise the structure of mathematical processes enables students to acquire deep conceptual understanding. It is through algebra, therefore, that students are able to explore and express mathematical…

Using a game-based context and concentrating explicitly on language, students in the early years are able to make sense about place value amid the vagaries of the English language in naming numbers. This conceptual approach to understanding place value allows students to further develop number strategies beyond counting by ones.

Very recently, in the "Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers (AAMT)/Australian Industry Group quantitative report" (2014), concerns were raised that school mathematics is lacking real world application. This report highlighted the gaps between school mathematics and the requirements of the workplace. After interviewing industry…

It is important for students to make informed decisions about computation. This article highlights this importance and develops a framework which may assist teachers to help students to make effective computational choices.

This article takes the position that teachers can use simple manipulative materials to model relatively complex situations and in doing so scaffold the development of students' number sense and early algebra skills. While students' early experiences are usually dominated by the cardinal aspect of number (i.e., counting the number of items in a…

Benchmarking is an important strategy for comparing the size of fractions. In addition, knowing whether a given fraction is greater or less than a particular benchmark (e.g., one-half) can support students with accurately locating the fraction on a number line. This article offers a game-based activity that engages students in discussions around…