Teaching Mathematics Creatively

This revised and updated third edition offers a range of strategies, activities and ideas to bring mathematics to life in the primary classroom. Taking an innovative and playful approach to maths teaching, this book promotes creativity as a key element of practice and offers ideas to help your students develop knowledge, understanding and enjoyment of the subject. In the creative classroom, mathematics becomes a tool to build confidence, develop problem solving skills and motivate children. The fresh approaches explored in this book include a range of activities such as storytelling, music and construction, elevating maths learning beyond subject knowledge itself to enable students to see mathematics in a new way. Key chapters of this book explore: • Learning maths outdoors - make more noise, make more mess or work on a larger scale • Everyday maths - making sense of the numbers, patterns, shapes and measures children see around them • Music and maths – the role of rhythm in learning, and music and pattern in maths Stimulating, accessible and underpinned by the latest research and theory, this is essential reading for trainee and practising teachers who wish to embed creative approaches to maths teaching in their classroom.

How do you make mathematics relevant and exciting to young children? How can mathematics and literacy be combined in a meaningful way? How can stories inspire the teaching and learning of mathematics? This book explores the exciting ways in which story can be used as a flexible resource to facilitate children’s mathematical thinking. It looks at the potential relationship between story and mathematics and practically demonstrates how they can be combined to help children connect, understand and express mathematical ideas using story language. Written for all early years practitioners and students, the book offers a playful pedagogical approach to facilitating children’s mathematical thinking which brings a creative satisfaction and confidence to teaching mathematics. Encouraging a creative approach to teaching mathematics that draws on picture books and oral mathematical stories, the book shows you how to: Move from reading to telling stories with mathematical themes Encourage children to pose and solve problems by playing with the plot of stories Enable children to translate abstract mathematical ideas to concrete representations with supporting story props and puppets Create original oral mathematical stories alongside children Capture children’s mathematical thinking in an observational framework, supported with audio or video recordings which can be shared with parents and colleagues There are free audio recordings of children and adults telling oral mathematical stories, which feature in the book. These can be downloaded from: www.routledge.com/9780415688154 This book draws on practical work with children, educators, parents, professional storytellers, and trainee practitioners, who bring theoretical ideas to life and offer insight into their mathematical story experiences. It is a ‘must have’ for all those who want to make mathematics relevant, accessible and imaginative for young children.

Offering teachers a dynamic and different perspective on mathematics, this book enables them to see and teach in creative ways that will develop their pupil's mathematical thinking potential.

This stimulating text shows how primary mathematics can be creative, exciting and enjoyable. Offering teachers a dynamic and different perspective, it enables them to see and teach in creative ways that will develop their pupil’s mathematical thinking potential. Creative Teaching: Mathematics in the Primary Classroom encourages students, trainees and practicing teachers to envision and develop a classroom where children can take risks, enjoy and experiment with mathematical thinking, and discover and pursue their interests and talents in an imaginative yet purposeful way. This second edition contains key updates to reflect the changes to the primary curriculum and includes: new sections on: specialist teaching, parental engagement and approaches to homework; creative classroom environments; working walls, displays and outdoor settings; links to assessment, speaking, listening and learning theory; use of media, film, news and stories for creative learning; cross-curricula work. Featuring reflective tasks in every chapter, this book will prove essential and inspiring reading for all trainee and practising teachers looking to develop their creative practice. Aimed at primary and early years trainee teachers, NQTs and experienced teachers, this is a timely publication for teachers and schools seeking to broaden their maths curriculum, making it more creative and appealing to young minds.

This volume provides new insights on creativity while focusing on innovative methodological approaches in research and practice of integrating technological tools and environments in mathematics teaching and learning. This work is being built on the discussions at the mini-symposium on Creativity and Technology at the International Conference on Mathematical Creativity and Giftedness (ICMCG) in Denver, USA (2014), and other contributions to the topic. The book emphasizes a diversity of views, a variety of contexts, angles and cultures of thought, as well as mathematical and educational practices. The authors of each chapter explore the potential of technology to foster creative and divergent mathematical thinking, problem solving and problem posing, creative use of dynamic, multimodal and interactive software by teachers and learners, as well as other digital media and tools while widening and enriching transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary connections in mathematics classroom. Along with ground-breaking innovative approaches, the book aims to provide researchers and practitioners with new paths for diversification of opportunities for all students to become more creative and innovative mathematics learners. A framework for dynamic learning conditions of leveraging mathematical creativity with technology is an outcome of the book as well.

Flexible, effective and creative primary school teachers require subject knowledge, an understanding of their pupils and how they learn, a range of strategies for managing behaviour and organising environments for learning, and the ability to respond to dynamic classroom situations. This third edition of Learning to Teach in the Primary School is fully updated with reference to the new National Curriculum, and has been revised to provide even more practical advice and guidance to trainee primary teachers. Twenty-two new authors have been involved and connections are now made to Northern Irish, Welsh and Scottish policies. In addition, five new units have been included on: making the most of your placement play and exploration in learning behaviour management special educational needs phonics. With Masters-level reflective tasks and suggestions for research-based further reading, the book provides valuable support to trainee teachers engaged in learning through school-based experience and through reading, discussion and reflections as part of a teacher education course. It provides an accessible and engaging introduction to knowledge about teaching and learning that every student teacher needs to acquire in order to gain qualified teacher status (QTS). This comprehensive textbook is essential reading for all students training to be primary school teachers, including those on undergraduate teacher training courses (BEd, BA with QTS, BSc with QTS), postgraduate teacher training courses (PGCE, SCITT) and employment-based teacher training courses (Schools Direct, Teach First), plus those studying Education Studies. This textbook is supported by a free companion website with additional resources for instructors and students and can be accessed at www.routledge.com/cw/Cremin.

Unlocking Creativity in Solving Novel Mathematics Problems delivers a fascinating insight into thinking and feeling approaches used in creative problem solving and explores whether attending to ‘feeling’ makes any difference to solving novel problems successfully. With a focus on research throughout, this book reveals ways of identifying, describing and measuring ‘feeling’ (or ‘intuition’) in problem-solving processes. It details construction of a new creative problem-solving conceptual framework using cognitive and non-cognitive elements, including the brain’s visuo-spatial and linguistic circuits, conscious and non-conscious mental activity, and the generation of feeling in listening to the self, identified from verbal data. This framework becomes the process model for developing a comprehensive quantitative model of creative problem solving incorporating the Person, Product, Process and Environment dimensions of creativity. In a world constantly seeking new ideas and new approaches to solving complex problems, the application of this book’s findings will revolutionize the way students, teachers, businesses and industries approach novel problem solving, and mathematics learning and teaching.

This volume provides readers with a broad view on the variety of issues related to the educational research and practices in the field of Creativity in Mathematics and Mathematical Giftedness. The book explores (a) the relationship between creativity and giftedness; (b) empirical work with high ability (or gifted) students in the classroom and its implications for teaching mathematics; (c) interdisciplinary work which views creativity as a complex phenomena that cannot be understood from within the borders of disciplines, i.e., to present research and theorists from disciplines such as neuroscience and complexity theory; and (d) findings from psychology that pertain the creatively gifted students. As a whole, this volume brings together perspectives from mathematics educators, psychologists, neuroscientists, and teachers to present a collection of empirical, theoretical and philosophical works that address the complexity of mathematical creativity and giftedness, its origins, nature, nurture and ways forward. In keeping with the spirit of the series, the anthology substantially builds on previous ZDM volumes on interdisciplinarity (2009), creativity and giftedness (2013).