- Each Strand of math has Big Ideas that begin in early Elementary School and progress all the way through the the Secondary Level.
- The Big Ideas are an “internal map” of the subject (Small, 2009) that shows how the different topics connect between the grades.
According the to the Report of the Expert Panel on Mathematics from Grades 4-6 in Ontario (2004), by using the Big Deals; children are better able to see the connections in mathematics and learn more effectively when it is organized in big, coherent “chunks”. Therefore the Big Ideas are these "chunks".
Teachers are encouraged to focus their instruction on the big ideas which will increase the student's learning and depth of understanding. These big ideas are embedded in the curriculum across the grades. Students then have an increased connection due to their prior knowledge of the big idea which gets increasingly complex as they progress through each grade (Report of the Expert Panel on Mathematics from Grades 4-6 in Ontario, (2004).