Rationale
Learning mathematics creates opportunities for and enriches the lives of all Australians. The Australian Curriculum: Mathematics provides students with essential mathematical skills and knowledge in number and algebra, measurement and geometry, and statistics and probability.Aims
The Australian Curriculum: Mathematics aims to ensure that students:are confident, creative users and communicators of mathematics, able to investigate, represent and interpret situations in their personal and work lives and as active citizens.
Key ideas
In Mathematics, the key ideas are the proficiency strands of understanding, fluency, problem-solving and reasoning. The proficiency strands describe the actions in which students can engage when learning and using the content.Structure
The Australian Curriculum: Mathematics is organised around the interaction of three content strands and four proficiency strands.The content strands are number and algebra, measurement and geometry, and statistics and probability. They describe what is to be taught and learnt.
PDF documents
Resources and support materials for the Australian Curriculum: Mathematics are available as PDF documents.Mathematics: Sequence of content
Mathematics: Sequence of achievement
Glossary
Year 4
Year 4 Level Description
The proficiency strands understanding, fluency, problem-solving and reasoning are an integral part of mathematics content across the three content strands: number and algebra, measurement and geometry, and statistics and probability. The proficiencies reinforce the significance of working mathematically within the content and describe how the content is explored or developed. They provide the language to build in the developmental aspects of the learning of mathematics. The achievement standards reflect the content and encompass the proficiencies.
At this year level:
- understanding includes making connections between representations of numbers, partitioning and combining numbers flexibly, extending place value to decimals, using appropriate language to communicate times and describing properties of symmetrical shapes
- fluency includes recalling multiplication tables, communicating sequences of simple fractions, using instruments to measure accurately, creating patterns with shapes and their transformations and collecting and recording data
- problem-solving includes formulating, modelling and recording authentic situations involving operations, comparing large numbers with each other, comparing time durations and using properties of numbers to continue patterns
- reasoning includes using generalising from number properties and results of calculations, deriving strategies for unfamiliar multiplication and division tasks, comparing angles, communicating information using graphical displays and evaluating the appropriateness of different displays.
Year 4 Content Descriptions
Number and place value
Fractions and decimals
Money and financial mathematics
Patterns and algebra
Using units of measurement
Shape
Location and transformation
Geometric reasoning
Year 4 Achievement Standards
By the end of Year 4, students choose appropriate strategies for calculations involving multiplication and division. They recognise common equivalent fractions in familiar contexts and make connections between fraction and decimal notations up to two decimal places. Students solve simple purchasing problems. They identify and explain strategies for finding unknown quantities in number sentences. They describe number patterns resulting from multiplication. Students compare areas of regular and irregular shapes using informal units. They solve problems involving time duration. They interpret information contained in maps. Students identify dependent and independent events. They describe different methods for data collection and representation, and evaluate their effectiveness.
Students use the properties of odd and even numbers. They recall multiplication facts to 10 x 10 and related division facts. Students locate familiar fractions on a number line. They continue number sequences involving multiples of single digit numbers. Students use scaled instruments to measure temperatures, lengths, shapes and objects. They convert between units of time. Students create symmetrical shapes and patterns. They classify angles in relation to a right angle. Students list the probabilities of everyday events. They construct data displays from given or collected data.