Handwriting
Recent research describes the importance and impact of teaching handwriting, particularly in the first four years of school.
What’s your favourite maths game?
Last week during one of my webinars a teacher asked “what maths games do you recommend”? What a great question! My first response was anything with cards, dice or dominoes and I went straight to recommending Paul Swan’s work. His books have always been a staple in my mathematics classroom and his website is fantastic…
Graphic images
Understanding that visual images convey meaning on different levels supports the development of understanding that words in written text can do the same thing – the viewer/reader can infer meaning from the message created by the author.
Maths at the Zoo
This weekend I visited Taronga Zoo in Sydney with my ten year old daughter. It was a lovely sunny day and was a great opportunity to go on an excursion, something that I know won’t be possible through school for a while. Apart from just enjoying wondering around and seeing all the animals, the zoo…
Building words
We are a creative lot, always discovering new things and combining familiar ideas into new ones. The term COVID-19 is one such term, created to explicitly refer to this pandemic we are all experiencing.
Building houses and buying pets: The maths of Roblox
What are you kids doing these holidays? If they are anything like mine, they are often playing games on the computer. My two daughters love playing online games while Facetiming friends as they play at the same time. At first this seemed weird to this Generation Xer. I didn’t think it counted as ‘being social’…
Back to school
Back at school, we need ways to ensure that the classroom’s richness as a learning environment is maximised.
Where to from here?
“Children are always learning.” Rebecca Brooks, The myth of ‘catching up’ after Covid-19 As restrictions continue to ease in NSW, I have resumed some of my support and professional learning with primary schools via Zoom. One of the first things I have been reiterating to teachers is, don’t feel the pressure to ‘catch up’. My…
Literacy, assessment and where to from here?
I have been clearing out many of my old and well used resources. The Graded Reading Vocabulary Test, was the ‘go to’ guide for many years. It was designed to ‘calculate a reading age’, and consisted of a list of words to be read to the teacher. The test began with: tree little milk egg…
The turtle tweet: Teacher collaboration at its best!
I love checking Twitter daily to read about what’s happening in classrooms both locally and internationally regarding mathematics education. I find great new articles about mathematics research, see amazing tasks and engaged students, observe innovation in action, and collect ideas that I can use with young students as well as with in-service teachers and pre-service…