Dr Ange's Blog

I applied for a Numeracy Leader position and I knew I wouldn’t be successful!

I had been working at my school for about 3 years when the opportunity came up to apply for the Numeracy Leader role.

In teaching, sometimes you have to take a bit of a leap and decide upon the path you would like to fol...

Dear English Number Naming System developer,

I write this letter on behalf of all the 6 and 7 year old English speaking children in the world, all those people learning English for the first time, and their hardworking teachers.

Firstly, I just wanted to start by saying thank you for all your hard...

If I could choose one thing to teach in place value it would be…Renaming

Over the years I have taught many Year 3-6 students who display a superficial understanding of our whole number place value system. This has not only held them back from mastering decimals, it has also hindered the development...

As you may know, my PhD research looked at the place value understandings of Year 3-6 students. In this blog I wanted to share with you an interesting discovery I made through my research.

I call it the "600 block misconception".

Basically students with this misconception look at the Base Ten thou...

When I work with students, I love to celebrate mistakes and promote a growth mindset (Dweck, 2016). I encourage all students to see that through mistakes comes learning. I like to label misconceptions as ‘thinking mistakes’. ‘Thinking mistakes’ are in direct contrast to ‘silly mistakes’- ones which ...

Thinking Mistake: Calculating

When I work with students, I love to celebrate mistakes and promote a growth mindset (Dweck, 2016). I encourage all students to see that through mistakes comes learning. I like to label misconceptions as ‘thinking mistakes’. ‘Thinking mistakes’ are in direct contrast t...

The six aspects of place value

My experience as a teacher, leader and researcher in Years 3-6 classrooms has led me to believe that many of our students can be described as ‘apparent experts’ in place value. These students appear to understand place value, yet often their knowledge falters with ...

The winter Olympics are an amazing sporting event that most Australian’s don’t know a whole lot about.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t use it as a great context for some maths investigations.

Here are 6 cool (pardon the pun) ways to infuse some Winter Olympics into your maths lessons.

1. Coin Curl...

In this blog post I wanted to explore the ‘100 days of school’ celebration so many of us organise at school.

I love 100 days for a few reasons:

1. It promotes counting
2. The Foundation students LOVE it (and look super cute dressed as 100 year olds!)
3. It can be provide a gentle introduction to the id...

If you follow me on Instagram/Facebook you will know that I love playing, and encouraging parents and children, to play board and card games.

Literally, I am yet to come across a game that doesn’t involve maths in some way! 

So, I wanted to share another way that I promoted numeracy at my school. ...

In this week’s blog post I wanted to share some tips on increasing the profile of maths at your school

An important part of our role as Numeracy Leaders, is to increase the profile of Numeracy in our school. One way you can do this is through creating a regular section in the school newsletter.

No...

In this blog post I wanted to share with you some tips on preparing and facilitating a maths parent information night.

I have done a LOT of these over the years (at my own school when I was a Numeracy Leader, and in other schools as a consultant) and wanted to share some of my tips.

1. The audienc...