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…

Colleen Vale makes the case for professional learning teams collaborating together to improve their teaching and hence children's achievement. In this article she describes how this may be done. Along the way the teachers explored the idea of equivalence and the common conceptions and misconceptions held by children in their classes.

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…

Fractions are generally introduced to students using the part--whole model. Yet the number line is another important representation which can be used to build fraction concepts (Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA], 2012). Number lines are recognised as key in students' number development not only of fractions, but…

Understanding fractions remains problematic for many students. The use of the number line aids in this understanding, but requires students to recognise that a fraction represents the distance from zero to a dot or arrow marked on a number line which is a linear scale. This article continues the discussion from "Identifying Fractions on a…

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…

Tracy Logan and Tom Lowrie argue that while little attention is given to visual imagery and spatial reasoning within the Australian Curriculum, a significant proportion of National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) tasks require high levels of visuospatial reasoning. This article includes teaching ideas to promote visuospatial…

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 providing a continued focus on tasks and activities that help to illustrate key ideas embedded in the new Australian Curriculum, the focus in this issue is on Measurement in the Measurement and Geometry strand. The small unit of work on measurement presented in this article has activities that can be modified to meet the requirements of…

Many students have difficulties in geometric and spatial thinking (see Pittalis & Christou, 2010). Students who are asked to construct models of geometric thought not previously learnt may be forced into rote learning and only gain temporary or superficial success (Van de Walle & Folk, 2008, p. 431). Therefore it is imperative for…

Peter Farrell provides some interesting insight into the importance of teacher research and gives examples of his own research from his personal classroom experiences. The importance of disseminating findings from the classroom as professional development is discussed.

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.…

This article promotes the use of mathematically appropriate, engaging and challenging tasks to support learning that is worthwhile. The authors share insights from a three-lesson design experiment and the three tasks along with the results from their implementation are explored.

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…