Haylock with Manning Student Workbook arrived!

A parcel containing copies of the new Student Workbook to accompany the fourth edition of Mathematics Explained for Primary Teachers was delivered to me last week! It's very exciting to see it in print. Those who ordered copies pre-release should be getting them any day now. I'm expecting the new fourth edition of Mathematics Explained within a few days and I'm looking forward to seeing the phrase 'This title has not yet been released' disappear from the book-selling websites.

My colleague and good friend at UEA, Ralph Manning, helped me with the student workbook and set up the student trials of our first draft. For each of Chapters 6–29 of Mathematics Explained we have included in the workbook tasks that check understanding, tasks that require using and applying the mathematical content, and tasks about learning and teaching.

Below is an example of a learning and teaching task, for the chapter on Classifying Shapes.

"Here are some common errors made by primary school children about shapes. How would you respond to these?

(a) A 6-year-old insists that a square drawn with its sides at an angle of 45 degrees to the edges of the paper is a diamond and not a square.

(b) A 7-year-old calls a sphere a circle and a cube a square.

(c) A 9-year-old says that the diagonals of a parallelogram are lines of symmetry."

I'll post our answers on my blog some time next week. Or you could buy the book, of course ...!