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Our beliefs about mathematics play a significant role in how we approach learning within the discipline. These beliefs are established by the nature of our early engagement with mathematics and are difficult to change once established. For many people mathematics is viewed as a subject that is not for them. Indeed the situation is so bad that many people will say that they are not a maths person and approach mathematics with fear and anxiety. 

This traditional pedagogy results in students developing a negative attitude towards mathematics. Many develop a mathematical phobia and believe that they are not a "maths person". When confronted by challenging mathematics they retreat and have no or only poor strategies with which to approach new ideas. This all leads to a decline in the number of students pursuing mathematical learning beyond the years where it is compulsory. Fortunately there is a growing body of research that shows there is a better way. 

A site called Yummy Math. At first glance the two words may seem at odds...unless you're talking about using some food items as manipulatives. Their tagline is "We provide teachers and students with mathematics relevant to our world today …"   As I investigated further, I realized these were a collection of "math stories" that set up a real-world scenario; then they pose questions for the students to ponder and problem-solve. They are timely with current events. Currently, there are math stories on March Madness, Pi Day, Green green Chicago River, and Shamrock Shakes. You can search by month or by math standard. Each math story involves multiple math standards and new stories are regularly added.

We provide teachers and students with mathematics relevant to our world today

"While it's true that most people in math class don't learn much math, most kids in French class don't learn much French. But, we don't say that they are not "French-ly minded." We don't say that they don't have a head for French because we know that if they grew-up in France, they would learn French perfectly well. And I think that my image of learning mathematics is that if we all learned mathematics in "Mathland," we would all learn mathematics perfectly well. "

This site provides a range of resources, math games, and hands-on math activities aligned with the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics. Also available are Math Journal tasks for Kindergarten, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th Grade for teachers looking to use Math Journals as a means of providing students with opportunities to organize, clarify and reflect on their thinking while developing key mathematical skills and understandings.

This site provides an extensive collection of free resources, math games, and hands-on math activities aligned with the Common Core State Standards.

"Primary school students are more likely to understand and engage with maths if classes use real money and real-life projects, according to a Western Sydney University pilot study. The findings come as Australian students lag behind other countries in maths, with Year 4 students dropping from 18th to 28th out of 49 countries in year 4 maths in the latest Trends in International Mathematics and Science study."

Parents who excel at maths produce children who excel at maths. This is according to a recently released University of Pittsburgh study, which shows a distinct transfer of math skills from parent to child. The study specifically explored intergenerational transmission-the concept of parental influence on an offspring's behaviour or psychology-in mathematic capabilities.

""Me, Myself and Math" is a six-part series that looks at us through the lens of math. Steven Strogatz is the Schurman Professor of applied mathematics at Cornell University. A frequent guest on WNYC's "Radiolab," he is the author, most recently, of "The Joy of x," which grew out of his previous Opinionator series "The Elements of Math"."

An amazing, vast and well made maths site with interactive animated lessons on every area of the primary curriculum. Make sure you check out the glossary section for a superb interactive maths dictionary. A must try site! http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Maths

Great math animations and activities to teach math concepts on the IWB

"I often sit on a Thursday evening about 2000hrs and watch the ukedchat hashtag. This week it was about physical education. Although this is not one of my strong subjects in teaching (or even in real life) I was interested in the first question which asked how physical education could be related to literacy and/or mathematics. Just like a GSCE multiple choice essay question I chose to answer how it could be related to mathematics. You can see the full tweet chat conversation here - but I thought I would expand my response in this week's waffle."

We are a nonprofit organization with a mission to improve mathematics education in US public secondary schools by recruiting, training and retaining outstanding mathematics teachers.

Absurd Math is an interactive mathematical problem solving game series. The player proceeds on missions in a strange world where the ultimate power consists of mathematical skill and knowledge.

Traditional methods of teaching maths have more in common with how we programme a computer that what we might do if we wanted to engage our students in mathematical thinking. We shouldn't be overly surprised then when our students consider mathematics to be all about learning a set of rules that they need to apply in the right order so as to output the correct response. But is there a better way?

From rockets to stock markets, many of humanity's most thrilling creations are powered by math. So why do kids lose interest in it? Conrad Wolfram says the part of math we teach - calculation by hand - isn't just tedious, it's mostly irrelevant to real mathematics and the real world. He presents his radical idea: teaching kids math through computer programming.

This blog post discusses the use of apps that are not specifically designed for Math in Mathematics teaching and learning. It include a range of teaching applications and provides links to all relevant apps

Get the Math is a super website designed to provide teachers and students with Algebra-based mathematics challenges. Get the Math tries to put the challenges in the context of the "real world" scenarios of fashion design, video game design, and music production.

A great site for mathematical problems. Interactive resources available as well. Teacher notes as well for solving particular problems.

"Usually, being able to visualise mathematical concepts to students is an important step in helping them understand techniques to illustrate connections with previous learning, helping them master maths notions to progress their skills. The importance of visualising concepts is clearly integral for Peter Mattock who has collected together a valued resource of mathematical activities that can be used with manipulative across the age and ability range."

"In September we introduced the new curriculum across all subjects and all of our school. This was scaffolding using the Chris Quigley's Essentials materials, during the previous year we had used a numeracy curriculum created by teachers within the Deal Learning Alliance, which a great source and piece of collaborative work in its own right, held too many links back to APP statement and old national curriculum levels. As as school we were finding that the DLA maths document did not provide the scaffold for the raised expectations in mathematics primary curriculum, furthermore, the deeper into the curriculum we delved, the harder it seemed to make the teaching, learning and assessment work efficiently."