As part of the Contemporary Teaching and Learning of Mathematics Project (CTLM), the mathematics education team at Australian Catholic University has the privilege of working with principals, teachers, students, and parents in schools in the Melbourne Archdiocese. A particular highlight is the opportunity to work alongside project teachers and…

When asked to calculate the area of a particular shape, one student responded by asking, "Is that the outside or the inside?" while another student replied, "I think it's the one where you put a little 2 next to it." Both of these responses indicate a lack of conceptual understanding of area and reinforce the research findings that students…

Perimeter and area are important real-world concepts in their own right, and their relationship certainly is no less important. This relationship can be intuitively challenging for both children and adults. In this article, the author explores the relationship between perimeter and area with students from grades 4 to 6. The study of perimeter-area…

Recently, the author has been fortunate to be a visitor in a number of classrooms in the United States, England and Europe. On one such visit to an Elementary School in Columbia, Missouri, the teachers accepted him into their normal classrooms for their normal lessons. He moved between three classes: Grade 1, Grade 2 and Grade 4. A snapshot…

In this article, the authors would like to look at a range of solutions submitted by Year 4-5 teams in the 2003 "Naturally Mathematical Challenge" to a question that involves no more than the numbers 1 to 6 and possible arrangements of them. In the context of other competition questions and in their elaboration of mathematical process, they have…