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This article is intended to assist people who have never written for a journal, or who perhaps have never even thought about doing so. In this article, the authors provide some advice for budding Australian Primary Mathematics Classroom (APMC) authors. Information on where to start, what's already been done, what will be in the paper, who will read the paper, what happens after the paper is submitted, and the technical aspects of submitting your work is included.

The concept of a function is fundamental to virtually every aspect of mathematics and every branch of quantitative science. Presently this type of thinking is carolled at the secondary level, and yet it has many benefits for deepening the understanding of early arithmetic. This is particularly so in the way that operations can be considered as "changing" and how it explicitly illustrates the way in which addition and subtraction are inverse operations, with each "undoing" the other. With the move to introduce algebraic thinking into the elementary classrooms, this paper explores activities that exemplify this thinking with 6 year-old children. The authors collaboratively planned and implemented a series of hands-on activities over an eight-lesson program. The aim of these learning activities was to assist young children in understanding the key ideas in this area of mathematics. The activities not only encouraged active learning but also reflected the principles of socio-constructivist learning. (Contains 3 figures.)

Mathematical computation consists of both written computation and mental computation. The strategies for mental computation can be used to check the reasonableness of written computations. Mental computation has two distinguishing characteristics: "it produces an exact answer, and the procedure is performed mentally, without using external devices such as pencil and paper" (Reys, 1984, p. 548). It is important to consider the accuracy and efficiency of various mental computation strategies and this can be useful to discuss with students. Discussion about different strategies will enable students to consider different approaches and work towards development of efficient mental strategies for computation. Utilising a variety of strategies and methods for computation will enable students to develop a better understanding of computation processes and number sense. In this article, the authors put forth a strong case for an emphasis on developing mental calculation strategies with students, and suggest helpful teaching approaches to achieve this. (Contains 4 figures and 2 resources.)

Traditionally, primary schools place minimal emphasis upon relations and transformations as objects of study. In their research, the authors have found the young children can engage in conversations about equivalence and equations (Warren & Cooper, 2005a) and functional thinking (Warren & Cooper, 2005b). Fundamental to relations and transformations is the concept of the function, that is, how the value of certain quantities relate to the value of other quantities (Chazan, 1996), or how values are changed or mapped to other quantities, referred to in the literature as co-variational thinking. This paper reports on some recent classroom teaching that attempts to examine repeating patterns and use children's understandings of repeating pattern to begin to explore concepts related to functional thinking.

Estimation is an important skill for everyday living. Good estimators usually have a sound knowledge of basic facts, understand place value and use a variety of strategies to make their estimates. This paper describes an activity which is designed to provide students with opportunities to practice their rounding strategies with addition and multiplication. In particular, the activity shows that estimates fall within limits and that sometimes, an exaggerated estimate will not be useful.