Place value

Alf describes how the Gattegno chart helped a class of 7-9 year olds gain an awareness of place value and of the inverse relationship between multiplication and division.

These games use ten-frames to develop children's 'sense of ten'.

We are used to writing numbers in base ten, using 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. Eg. 75 means 7 tens and five units. This article explains how numbers can be written in any number base.

Freddie Manners, of Packwood Haugh School in Shropshire solved an alphanumeric without using the extra information supplied and this article explains his reasoning.

Once a basic number sense has developed for numbers up to ten, a strong 'sense of ten' needs to be developed as a foundation for both place value and mental calculations.

Marion Bond recommends that children should be allowed to use 'apparatus', so that they can physically handle the numbers involved in their calculations, for longer, or across a wider ability band, than is currently the norm.

Find out about palindromic numbers by reading this article.

Nowadays the calculator is very familiar to many of us. What did people do to save time working out more difficult problems before the calculator existed?

This article, written for teachers, looks at the different kinds of recordings encountered in Primary Mathematics lessons and the importance of not jumping to conclusions!

This article for the young and old talks about the origins of our number system and the important role zero has to play in it.