Mathematics Explained companion website

The new companion website for Mathematics Explained for Primary Teachers, 4th edition, is now up and running. There's an interview with the author, which you may find mildly interesting, information about the book, a table of contents, a compendium of all the key Teaching and Learning Points chapter by chapter, and some useful weblinks. A really useful inclusion is a complete glossary of all the key terms that appear in the book at the ends of the chapters, combined into one alphabetical list. There are also masses of freebies to support teachers and trainee teachers who use the book. Sage Publications have been very generous in offering so much free additional material for readers.

You'll find links for each chapter of the book with the mathematics National Curriculum programmes of study and level descriptions. When the National Curriculum does finally get revised I will update this. I've done the same with the new Scottish Curriculum for Excellence (more on this interesting approach to the curriculum in a later blog) – and I intend to do the same for the Welsh curriculum fairly soon.

You'll also find five free chapters from Haylock and Thangata (Key Concepts in Teaching Primary Mathematics) that you can download, plus masses of additional further practice material, taken from Numeracy for Teaching to help trainees with the Numeracy Test.

There's even a video of a lecture on Creativity in Mathematics that I gave recently to primary PGCE students at UEA. I think this just about works in this format, although occasionally the integration of my powerpoint slides into the video is just a little bewildering. My favourite moment in the lecture is when I manage to get nearly every student in the room to give the answer 'three' to the question, 'how many lines do you need to draw to cut a rectangle into four equal pieces?'