Dr Ange's Blog

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...

This week I wanted to share three things I really struggled with when I was in the role of Numeracy Leader.

I would love to know if you struggle with them too…

1. A lack of guidance in Numeracy Leadership: I felt like I didn’t really have anyone to ask specific Numeracy questions to, or support
...

One of the things I learnt throughout my time as a Numeracy leader is that many teachers are very anxious about teaching Maths. This observation is reinforced every year as I work with a new batch of pre-service teachers at uni. Many of these pre-service teachers freely admit that nothing scares the...

In a previous blog I mentioned the importance of always taking into consideration the amount of time you have been allocated, before you implement change at your school. Time has a major influence on your potential impact…

BUT if you are thinking… I have invested a lot of time into my role and I am...