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                                    There are a number of effective mathematics practices that should guide us all in our work, to include:%u2022 Set clear learning outcomes for the lesson or unit of work. These learning outcomes will then guide your instructional sequences.%u2022 Create learning tasks that foster and promote opportunities for mathematical reasoning, mathematical conversation and problem solving.%u2022 Provide opportunities for children to use and connect mathematical representations i.e. visual, symbolic, verbal, contextual, and physical. Making connections between these five areas of mathematical representation helps to deepen students%u2019 mathematical understanding.%u2022 Support and facilitate mathematical conversations. Facilitating mathematics discourse between students working on a shared problem helps to build a shared understanding of the mathematical ideas involved.%u2022 Set children purposeful questions and productive tasks to work on that will help further their mathematical reasoning and understanding of important mathematical concepts, ideas and relationships.%u2022 Effective mathematics teaching, first and foremost, builds conceptual understanding, and then procedural fluency. %u2018Conceptual Understanding%u2019 includes comprehension of mathematical concepts, operations, and relations, while %u2018Procedural Fluency%u2019 is the ability to apply procedures accurately, efficiently, and flexibly. We must teach for understanding!Who said mathematics is easy? It%u2019s not, but it can be fun, adventurous and a highly rewarding pursuit. We need to encourage children to both embrace and enjoy the challenge and to support their productive struggle in learning mathematics. Mathematics should be a collective, collaborative, shared affair, where children grapple with mathematical ideas and relationships together, as a shared, fun endeavour. Effective teachers elicit and use evidence of student mathematical thinking in order to assess progress toward mathematical understanding. Manipulatives play a key role in helping children to apply and clarify thinking as they explore solutions to a problem, but equally, the manipulatives such as Six Bricks help to make their thinking visible for the teacher as part of the assessment, intervention and support process.We contend that incorporating Six Bricks as a foundation block of your early years, reception and year 1 primary mathematics teaching curriculum, can transform how well your children come to understand mathematical concepts and processes, acquire and build skills and engage in and enjoy mathematics learning.In schools awash with mathematical teaching and learning materials, Six Bricks can be the resource that displaces many of these excess materials that often have such limited application. In schools where support materials for mathematics are scarce, then Six Bricks can be that rich over-arching, widely applicable resource that will drive hands-on, mathematical inquiry and problem-solving across a range of curriculum strands and strand units.
                                
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