Developed for pre-service primary teachers and practicing teachers, this book is also a valuable reference for early childhood educators, researchers, numeracy consultants & learning support staff.
As in previous editions of Mathematics for Children, this edition aims to support teachers at all levels of mathematics education—from early childhood to tertiary education—to develop their knowledge and understanding of mathematics by encouraging them to reflect on children’s learning and their own teaching of mathematics.
Mathematics for Children 4e continues the successful constructivist approach to learning of previous editions. It focuses on children developing their own mathematical ideas through growth and understanding of mathematical concepts, while challenging children to think mathematically.
Each chapter has been updated to incorporate the most recent significant research, changes to curricula and to teaching practices—in this sense, Mathematics for Children is a valuable and rich source of information for both practitioners and researchers.
Table of Contents
Part 1: Children learning mathematics
1: Teaching mathematics for understanding: insights from research and
practice
2: Challenging children to think mathematically: concepts and processes
Part 2: The growth of mathematical concepts and processes
3: Exploring algebraic thinking
4: Developing statistical reasoning through data exploration
5: Exploring chance and probability
6: Finding connections in space and geometry: shape, location and
transformation, and geometric reasoning
7: Using measurement to make links
8: Constructing early number concepts and relationships
9: Promoting number sense: beyond computation
10: Integrating fractions, decimals, ratio and proportional reasoning
Part 3: Facilitating mathematics learning
11: Linking assessment and pedagogy
12: Managing the learning environment
New to this Edition
Reflecting the rapid growth in the use of technology in the classroom, there is
an added focus on technology-supported learning via the inclusion of numerous
websites and digital learning tools throughout the book.
NEW MyEducationKit! containing video content to support the book, which allows
students and educators to view actual mathematics lessons in Australian
classrooms that link to some of the key ideas and provide visual examples of
mathematical learning.
Features and Benefits
- Each chapter aims to introduce key mathematics concepts and processes by blending aspects of theory, research and practice.
- Real-life scenarios and work samples exemplify certain aspects of children’s learning of mathematics and highlight the classroom application of the theory.
- Chapter overviews introduce students to the main focus of each chapter, and raises questions for students to consider.
- Growth of mathematical understanding section maps the growth of key mathematical concepts.
- Reflective questions, activities and ideas are a major part of the text to encourage educators to reflect and practice new skills.
- Action & Reflection sections have more critical tasks to encourage student analysis
Snapshots illustrate ways of acquiring particular mathematical concepts, processes and strategies. Accompanying the Snapshots is a range of questions and lesson ideas.