We got all 120 of the Year 4 students to complete the Maths Attitude Survey last week. (My dream is to get the whole of the school to do it, but we crawl before we walk...) I thought it would be interesting to look at their results so I got them to complete the survey as a Google Form. 113 out of the 120 completed it. Here are the results: So we had more girls complete the survey than boys. Interesting - we still some very positive words being chosen to describe maths. "Fun" was right up there but the No. #1 word of choice was "Challenging". We had a talk about that. The kids though ..read more

We had been doing an investigation into Vitruvian Man this week. You know, the picture that Leonardo drew: A fascinating picture with a fascinating story.  Anyway, all the scribble around the outside of the picture is actually Leonardo's mathematical calculations based on the ratios of the human body. Did you know that, in the "ideal" human body: - a palm is four fingers - a foot is four palms - a cubit is six palms - four cubits is the height of a man - a pace is four cubits - a man is 24 palms tall - the length of the outspread arms is equal to the height of a man. - from the hairline ..read more

Here in my part of Australia it is the end of Week 1, Term 1. Being a good teacher, I am always keen to get to know my new class quickly and to find out all about them. And this often involves assessment. Kind of sad if the first words of greeting are, "Hi kids! Did you have a great holiday? Sit down and do this test." Really, doing tests in Week 1 is harsh. But I still want to know about my kids.  So instead, I give my students an attitudinal survey so they can tell me how they "feel" about maths. I am teaching Year 4 this year. They are some of the kids I taught in Year 2 back in 2018 w ..read more

The Background Following our successful application in 2018 for an ACT Government Nature Play grant, I submitted an application on behalf of the Canberra Maths Association for another grant in 2019. As we had planned in 2018, we again proposed to: - write 10 inquiries/tasks/lessons/resources to be used outside in the natural environment - run a series of workshops with preschools to share these resources I am very please to announce that we were again successful in our application and got the grant. A group of about 10 interested preschool teachers met together one afternoon earlier in the y ..read more

Let's have a look at place value with Year 4. The Australian Curriculum says: Recognise, represent and order numbers to at least tens of thousands (ACMNA072) So we did. I got some 1mm grid paper and we started off with one tiny square. Then we cut out a row of 10. Then we cut out a square of 100. Then a row of 1000. It started getting a bit technical here. It seemed like I had hit a developmental barrier - a place that required some additional cognitive effort. I was a bit surprised but we worked our way through.  Obviously (to me at least) 10 000 was going to be 10 rows of ..read more