The Mathematics curriculum for British Columbia schools is changing. The curriculum has fewer learning standards, allowing teachers and students to spend more time on foundational skills and applying them to real-life situations. The curriculum is intentionally focused on “hands-on” experiential learning, using foundational skills to provide students with the opportunity to encounter math in a wide variety of experiences in everyday life. The goal of developing well-educated citizens is central to this feature of the curriculum.

Big Ideas

The Big Ideas consist of generalizations and principles and the key concepts important in an area of learning. They reflect the “Understand” component of the Know-Do-Understand model of learning.

The Big Ideas of the Mathematics curriculum reveal the progression of related skills and concepts. For each area of mathematics — number, patterns and relations, spatial sense, and statistics and probability — important concepts are introduced and evolve in both sophistication and degree of connection to the lives of students throughout the curriculum. The Big Ideas represent what students are expected to understand as a result of their learning.

To ensure a strong mathematical understanding, the Big Ideas are based on the powerful overriding themes of Mathematics that reflect the learning standards of each grade.

The five overriding themes are:

• Number represents and describes quantity.
• Development of computational fluency requires a strong sense of number.
• We use patterns to represent identified regularities and to form generalizations.
• We can describe, measure, and compare spatial relationships.
• Analyzing data and chance enables us to compare and interpret.

Streams

At the senior level, the three streams remain: Apprenticeship and Workplace Mathematics, Foundations, and Pre-Calculus. After the grade 9 course, you must choose one of three streams. Once this choice is made, a change of streams is difficult. The design and content of curriculum for each stream is so different that a transition could leave the student lacking in the skills and knowledge required to master the new course.

It is, therefore, important that students make an informed decision as to what stream they wish to follow. However, if a student finds that they require courses from another stream for a college or university program they later choose to pursue, the courses can be acquired at colleges, night schools, or adult education centres.

Teaching Staff: