The book lets teachers identify where their students are in terms of number skills, and sets out a strategy for developing their knowledge. The authors show how to advance children's learning across five stages of early arithmetical learning - emergent, perceptual, figurative, initial number, and facile number. This provides for increasingly sophisticated number strategies across addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, as well as developing children's number word and numeral knowledge, and their ability to structure number and have grouping strategies. The approach used nine guiding principles for teaching.
Each chapter has clearly defined teaching procedures which show how to take the children onto the next more sophisticated stage. The teaching procedures are organized into key teaching topics, and each includes:
- a clearly defined purpose
- detailed instructions, activities, learning tasks and reinforcing games
- lists of responses which children may make
- application in whole class, small group and individualised settings
- a link to the Learning Framework in Number (see Early Numeracy- second edition, 2005)
- how the guiding principles for teaching can be used to allow teachers to evaluate and reflect upon their practice
Primary practitioners in Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada have tested the teaching procedures which can be used in conjunction with each country's numeracy strategy.
Primary teachers, especially of the early years, mathematics co-ordinators, heads of school, mathematics advisers, special educationalists, learning support personnel, teacher assistants, lecturers in initial teacher training and educational psychologists will all find this book invaluable.
