Building from the concept of verbing mathematics as a culturally consistent and enabling mathematics education practice for Mi'kmaw learners, the authors present an elementary multiplication lesson affectionately named "Sets of, Rows of, Jumps of". Through examination of this specific set of tasks emerging notions of structuring, play,…

How do students cope with and make sense of polysemy in mathematics? Zazkis (1998) tackled these questions in the case of 'divisor' and 'quotient'. When requested to determine the quotient in the division of 12 by 5, some of her pre-service teachers operated in the domain of integers and argued for 2, while others adhered to rational numbers and…

Drawing on the work of Gattegno, it is suggested that a powerful way of teaching mathematics is to introduce symbols as relationships between visible or tangible resources. The symbols are abstract (formal) from the beginning and yet there are concrete resources to support their use. Drawing on data from a research project in primary schools in…