6 Summary of Week 1

Now that you have completed Week 1 you have learned how early counting leads to early addition, which then leads to subtraction, multiplication and division. Careful development of these skills helps children to achieve a sense of how numbers work, providing a firm foundation for future mathematics learning. You have explored varied methods, both mental and written methods, for adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing. Finally you have looked at place value and decimal numbers. You should now be able to:

• briefly describe how number sense develops in young children
• demonstrate a variety of mental, informal and formal written methods of basic arithmetic
• understand how place value underpins our number system in base ten, for both whole numbers and decimals.

Next week you will learn about the conceptual basis of fractions and percentages, the pitfalls learners often meet when studying fractions in particular and effective approaches to the teaching of fractions and percentages.

You can now go to Week 2.