ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explains about teaching children with very special educational needs who continue to work at early levels of learning throughout their school careers – or lives. It refers to the very wide range of children across all age phases and settings of special education. The book illustrates how maths can be practical or social or cultural – and illustrates the learning processes that are needed within a practical curriculum. Whatever curriculum model we adopt, a purpose of our teaching must be to enable these children to access as full a life as possible. Maths comes into it because there are so many ways that they need to understand about all sorts of things such as the quantities, sequences, comparisons of spaces and shapes they use and the time they live through.
