Educational Resources

1) A Learning and Teaching Resource for a Beginning Process

This resource was made using A4 paper, and purchased wrapping paper which was glued over the A4 paper.  The game board was created using Paint.NET (a picture editing software)  and numbers were manually typed in. Coloured dots were drawn with a permanent marker.  The whole board was then laminated. To play this game, students each have a game piece which is placed on start. The first student then rolls a dice and moves his counter that many spaces. The student then reads the number or counts the dots on the game board and uses paddle pop sticks to create this number. The next player then repeats this process, and the winner is the student who reaches the ‘finish’ square first. This game aims to teach students the relationship between the different representations of numbers – symbols and pictorial representations.

2) The Purpose of the Resource

The purpose of this resource is to reinforce two concepts – firstly, to identify a numeral or quantity and connect it to a number name, and then to match it to a number of paddle pop sticks. This is designed to assist students in recognising the correlation between these different forms of numbers, and meaningfully connect them, whilst also developing counting skills and early subitising (based on recognising a number of dots without counting them). By allowing students to work with both abstract (numerals and dots) and concrete materials (paddle pop sticks), students develop a well-rounded understanding about how these materials correlate to one another, whilst staying within an area of familiarity to the child. This resource is primarily designed for the foundation year, but can also be successfully used in Special Education contexts with slightly older students. This game is linked to the Foundation Year Mathematics curriculum, for the Number and Algebra strand and Number and Place Value sub-strand. The content descriptor reads ‘(students will) connect number names, numerals and quantities, including zero, initially up to 10 and then beyond (ACMNA002)’ and the elaboration is ‘understanding that each object must be counted only once, that the arrangement of objects does not affect how many there are, and that the last number counted answers the ‘how many’ question’. (ACARA, n.d.). When using the language model for mathematics with this board game, the second and third tiers of language should be used (Gregory, 2013). These tiers are the materials and mathematics tiers respectively, where materials language uses concrete items such as counters or paddle pop sticks, and the mathematics language uses numbers such as 7 or 6, with words such as ‘count’, or ‘how many are there?’.  The mathematics language is used initially, where students identify the number shown to them, and then the activity uses materials language to manipulate the paddle pop sticks to reinforce this idea in a more comfortable and familiar way to the child.