It’s the school holidays! Well, at least here in NSW it is, and I think this is a perfect time for mathematics. Now I know that not every child (or parent) would be excited about the idea of doing ‘more maths’ in the school holidays, but we need to change maths’ reputation! Mathematics is important,…
I’m not sure what weekend family nights look like at your house, but at ours it fluctuates between movies or games. My eldest daughter follows my own passion for games, recently it was Mahjong and this week it was monopoly! Oh no, not monopoly I hear a plethora of parents cry! Oh yes, monopoly. The…
This week’s blog is a follow up to my article from last year Top 10 maths ideas: When it all gets too hard that I wrote at a similar time, when we were in a similar situation – working, and learning from home. Our schools and teachers have done an amazing job in preparing our…
With school holidays approaching in many parts of Australia, I thought it was timely to recommend some holiday reading for primary teachers of mathematics. Last year I wrote a blog titled Keeping up with the current that focused on three mathematics education research articles for teachers to explore. The current blog provides a few recent…
This week’s blog is inspired by research that James Russo, Toby Russo, and Leicha Bragg have recently conducted (and will present at the upcoming MERGA online conference) about factors that influence the mathematical games teachers’ choose. They propose a number of factor themes related to why teachers choose specific games – I will utilise these themes to share a…
The Mathematical Association of NSW’s (@MathsNSW) annual Pre K-8 conference was held last Friday and Saturday. What a wonderful opportunity it was to meet up with other teachers and educators to chat and learn about mathematics. Last year the conference was unable to go ahead so it’s been a while since could meet together face-to-face…
I was inspired a few weeks ago by a Twitter post I found that Mrs. Unsworth’s (@MrsUnsworthWTT) had previously shared about using a concrete hundreds chart to visualise skip counting. I really loved the way the students moved across the mat to show how they were counting. I thought this was an excellent way to…
Primary Learning’s online courses have been approved until 31 July 2021 under NESA’s interim arrangements. This is a great opportunity to work on proven PD and ensure both learning and hours are consolidated.
Well it’s the start of a new year in Australian schools and this is a busy time for students and teachers. Apart from getting to know perhaps a new teacher or new classmates, students will also be getting ready for new learning. The first week or two at school are usually a time for teachers…
The range of books for children to read about our world was pretty limited when I was at primary school, Thank goodness that’s changed!