Today is the 5th of April 2013. It’s a rare-ish moment in time, where a nice pattern is created. It’s also fairly rare that the trick works for both Americans and us Brits! I resent the fact that they get to celebrate Pi day on the 14th of March as they write it 3/14 whereas we notate […]
Today was a good little day. My class were out on a trip to the local high school which meant that I was in school with a quiet classroom getting on with jobs. Always a good thing. I added a graph to the school website showing attendances for last week – all I need to do is […]
Key points: This article is full of ideas to support my action research with children when the time comes. I intend to use some of the ideas within to help structure my input and form the base and review tasks. This article also grabs me as it contains citations of other authors I have read so […]
As most of you may or may not know, I love maths. I recently discovered Matt Henderson’s site: blog.matthen.com, and love his posts. As he says: I post original stuff about maths, space, computational linguistics and other things that I like. This blog is meant to be accessible andinteresting to people of all backgrounds. Now, for a lot of his posts, you don’t need to […]
Key points: Algebra is a third of the Malaysian Secondary Mathematics curriculum. The article lists a large range of sources relating to misconceptions in the understanding of algebra. It states that, because algebra is an extension of previously acquired mathematical learning, it is linked to the use of symbolic representations and that “Warren (2003) felt that understandings […]
Key points: The article discusses how algebraic equations can be shown as visual sentences. The example of x+y=4, where x>y is used. The Reception aged children are given two rules to colour them in: “they have to colour in four snails, and the number of brown-coloured snails must be more than the number of yellow-coloured […]
Key points: That children struggle to make the move from being in a situation where “not knowing answers (to arithmetic calculations) is treated negatively, and then suddenly introduced to algebra in which not knowing is treated positively as an opportunity to use symbols, as a way of working with not knowing.” “Whenever a learner solves […]
Key points: “Recent research on the status of student knowledge based in the traditional arithmetic-then-algebra regime has pointed to specific obstacles to algebra learning that computational arithmetic creates for the learning of algebra. For example, limited approaches to equality and the “=” sign in arithmetic as separator of procedure from result (Kieran, 1992) and now known to […]
“This paper describes a lesson taught to Judy’s Y2 class in a rural Hertfordshire primary school. It shows how meaningful mathematics can be made accessible to young children and, importantly, how fundamental issues of variant and invariant properties might be developed. An important component of this understanding is the position to term relationship – the relationship […]
The article gives a history of the mathematics landscape in the UK since 1837. Algebra has been part of this throughout. We see algebra as a key tool to help solve problems now, but historically “problem solving was seen as a specialized skill, only for mathematicians in opening up new fields.” Key points: “A problem […]