In providing a continued focus on tasks and activities that help to illustrate key ideas embedded in the new Australian Curriculum, this issue will focus on Number in the Number and Algebra strand. In this article Derek Hurrell provides a few tried and proven activities to develop place value understanding. These activities are provided for…

Developing proficiency in algebra is the focus of instruction in high school mathematics courses and is a minimum expectation for high school completion for all students including those with learning difficulties. However, the foundation for success is laid in grades 4-8 (aged 9-14). In this paper, we assert that students' development of algebraic…

Since 2001, the authors have been working with groups of teachers to investigate students' early algebraic thinking--learning representations, connections, and generalizations in the elementary school grades. They began paying attention to students' explicit remarks about regularities in the number system or what students imply by their…

The topics discussed are, "Helping Students Understand the Distributive Property,""Converting from Base 10: Nonintegral Bases?,""Rapid Mental Squaring of Mixed Numbers," and "Some Nonstandard Binary Operations and their Properties." (JT)