In this article Amy MacDonald asks us to reconsider the starting point for teaching measurement concepts. We are sure readers will enjoy looking at the drawings and reading of the implications for teachers of young children. We are certain that if you teach young children you will want to try the "Draw yourself measuring task".

This article by Elizabeth Reeve and Kim Beswick illustrates how primary children may engage with the Statistics and Probability content contained in the Australian Curriculum. Technology has opened up many possibilities for young children to engage with statistics. In the process the children learned a great deal more than just mathematics.

Lorna Quinnell and Merrilyn Carter examine the use of symbols in teaching mathematics and outline the difficulties students experience in "reading symbols and abbreviations." We are sure teachers will appreciate the way the authors have examined the use of symbols and abbreviations in NAPLAN testing and organized them into five distinct…

Lorraine Day reports on some of the findings of the Teaching Teachers for the Future Project. The Australian Curriculum constantly makes reference to digital technologies so we believe our readers will be interested to see how teachers are making use of technology in classrooms across Western Australia. The results may be used to…

It is great to see how the sharing of ideas sparks new ideas. In 2011 Lyon and Bragg wrote an "Australian Primary Mathematics Classroom" (APMC) article on the mathematics of kitchen gardens. In this article the authors show how the kitchen garden may be used as a starting point for proportional reasoning. The authors highlight different…

In this article Leicha Bragg introduces an open-ended assessment task that gives students the opportunity to access skills and knowledge from the Measurement and Geometry strand. Students take on the roles of cartographer and map user to "hide, map and seek."

In the middle years of school, it is important that mathematics is challenging, engaging and focuses on worthwhile mathematics. In this article, Anne Roche describes a lesson that seemed to have all three of these characteristics, as students grappled with issues of scale to create a fun run, given a range of challenging mathematical constraints.…

Peter Gould suggests Australia's next top fraction model should be a linear model rather than an area model. He provides a convincing argument and gives examples of ways to introduce a linear model in primary classrooms.

Jane Watson and Lyn English use a chance activity exploring expectation and variation with coin tossing to highlight the importance of understanding the part-whole relationship embodied in percentage and its power to measure and compare for different wholes, in this case different sample sizes. The purpose of this article is to raise awareness of…

As part of one of the undergraduate Bachelor of Education units offered as a specialisation unit in primary mathematics education at The University of Notre Dame Australia, the pre-service teachers were asked to complete an assignment. In this assignment they were given 12 typical algebra text book problems which they were asked to solve and then…

Engagement with mathematics during the primary years of schooling is crucial if students are to develop an appreciation for and understanding of the value of mathematics learning. It has been claimed that students who are engaged are more likely to learn, find the experience of schooling more rewarding, and are more likely to continue with higher…

This article outlines how a Brisbane independent school, Clayfield College, improved the ability of its Year 3 students to solve addition and subtraction word problems by utilising a schematic approach. It was observed that while students could read the words in the text of a written problem, many had difficulty identifying the core information…

Equivalence is mostly associated with the strand of Number and Algebra and is fundamental in both of the substrands. Equivalence is considered a key and foundational concept of algebra, and whereas an assumption might be made that equivalence is a relatively "easy" concept; studies have shown that when asked to balance an equation such…

Although number sense is difficult to define, it involves having a good intuition about numbers and their relationships, including the ability to have a "feel" for the relative size of numbers and to make reasonable estimations. Students with good number sense typically recognise the relative magnitude of numbers, appreciate the effect…

Autism is a neural development disorder which impairs one's ability to socialise, communicate, process sensory information, and those with autism experience restricted interests and repetitive behaviours. These signs all begin before three years of age and the child may have difficulty with organising their responses, with inhibition of repetitive…