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This paper aims to describe the development of children's understanding of metaphors and the type of part-whole relationships they are capable of establishing when solving puzzles. The study was carried out with 30 students from a federal elementary school in the state of Querétaro, Mexico: 10 second-year students, 10 fourth-year students and 10 sixth-year students. They were asked to answer four metaphorical puzzles and explain what information they had taken into account to arrive at their answers. The results show that: a) children's understanding of metaphors increases with their school year, and b) participants from higher years tend to establish more comprehensive and coherent part-whole relationships than students from lower years, which allows them to better understand metaphors in puzzles. The results confirm findings by Calderón (2012) and Calderón, Vernon and Carrillo (2012). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with knowledge related to the Day of the Dead explicitly expressed and conveyed through free elementary school textbooks, as knowing what is being passed on to children about this aspect of Mexican identity will uncover new ways of preserving traditions. The assessment was carried out using an instrument that indicated the kind of information contained in the pages of textbooks. The instrument used the Delphi method with help from experts in the field, which revealed the quantity and type of content included. The research found a lack of information about this cultural event in texts aimed at teachers, parents and elementary school students. This points to a deficiency in communication regarding this characteristic of Mexican culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the importance of word frequency lists in regulating the language used in school textbooks, as well as the frequency of their use in various fields of knowledge. Basing each word on the classical definition found in the Royal Spanish Academy Dictionary, our aim is to present the 5,000 most frequently used words in the official textbooks for elementary and middle school education in Mexico. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports a research about a group of in-service teachers working in primary public schools in a poor urban zone in Monterrey city, Mexico. Its main aim was to study teachers' conceptions about the teaching of subtraction and, in particular, to know more about the role that they assign to context and contextualizing in the teaching process. Broadly speaking, the research arose from the interest to know more about the relationship between the training and education in mathematics of primary teachers and how the teaching and learning of mathematics actually takes place at school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]