Understanding of, and fluency in the use of, number facts and relationships, is a key to further understanding of mathematical concepts.
Desmos is an interactive graphing calculator that allows teachers to set engaging instruction, exploration and practice tasks. With many existing resources, and capacity to create your own, there are applications for all year levels and topics.
A collection of activities to explore proportional reasoning and emerging algebra techniques. Most activities can be used effectively live, or set as work to complete, and offer the functionality of giving individual feedback.
A collection of videos and activities to support the learning of arithmetic relating to fractions.
Youcubed, created by Jo Boaler, is a branch of Stanford University’s school of education. The program’s main goal is to inspire, educate and empower teachers of mathematics, transforming the latest research on mathematics into accessible and practical forms.
This resource is a four-week algebra program aimed at maintaining a positive mathematical mindset. One or more tasks can be used from the unit of work, and some minor adaptation is needed to run online. Lesson three is a particularly good selection of tasks for developing algebraic understanding.
The youcubed method and resources will likely be different to how many parents were educated in mathematics. To keep abreast of the research that informs it, and to find out more about mathematical mindsets, parents can access the youcubed parent resources.
Link: Mathematical Mindset Algebra
Link: Youcubed Parent Resources
While “Open Middle” is an unusual name for a website of mathematics problems, it is a great way of getting students to practice and work within a higher depth of knowledge and conceptual understanding, and encourage critical and creative thinking to approach a problem.
The problems in this section can be set for practice in a lesson, reducing the number of problems that need to be set. The strategy for the teacher is to “talk-through” the different methods, and supporting students to move beyond “guess and check” methods and consider linking their prior knowledge to solve the problems.
Prime climb is an excellent board game that uses mathematical reasoning in a strategic and somewhat competitive way. The board is a path made of the numbers from 0 to 101, coloured by an ingenious and beautiful system.
If parents want to engage with some fun mathematical play with their child, body scale prime climb is a great option that everyone in the family can get involved with.
Which One Doesn't Belong? Is a website that provides thought-provoking puzzles for mathematics teachers, students and families. There are no answers provided as there are many different, correct ways of choosing which one doesn't belong.
The number problems can be used as a prompt for a lesson that can be streamed, or alternatively, engaging students in providing their own reasoning through effective communication. In the online environment, posting one of these problems on your Learning Management System, and asking students to vote for their correct answer (but keep this hidden from the students) and write a short response that summarises their reasoning. A follow up can be to review the votes of the poll, and then ask students to write why they think someone would have chosen the other answers. The final step in the sequence is to then reveal a model answer and explain what makes more effective mathematical communication. This can be done once a week to continue to build on the quality of responses over time.
The reSolve teaching resources provide exemplary materials from Years F to 10. They put into practice the elements of the reSolve Protocol and promote fluency, deep understanding, strategic problem solving, and mathematical reasoning. A number of the resources have been made by South Australian teachers, and all are aligned with the Australian Curriculum.
As an inquiry protocol, these mathematics resources do need some structure and group norms to be formed around them, but when used effectively, they can be powerful. In a remote environment, some lessons will be very useful for getting students to actively collect data or information from the world around them.
Actions taken to enable students with disability to access and participate in education on the same basis as other students.