The purpose of this study is to identify how elementary teachers experience students understanding of mathematical texts and how they work with reading comprehension in mathematics. Another purpose is to examine what types of mathematical texts pupils encounter in the early years of elementary school. To fulfil the purpose of the study two different methods are used qualitative interviews and a quantitative text analysis. Five teachers are interviewed about their views on and work with reading comprehension in mathematics and texts from three mathematic textbooks are analyzed. The results show that the teachers mainly use five different ways of working to develop the pupils reading comprehension in mathematics. These ways are to evoke pre-understanding, to display, to employ ready-made models for problem solving and reading comprehension, to expand the word and concept comprehension and to carry out instruction in whole class or in smaller groups. Thus they try to provide scaffolding for the pupils reading comprehension. The study also shows that teachers experience that pupils hurry and are careless in their reading of mathematical texts and consequently have trouble understanding them. This could be due to the solution focus in Swedish mathematics teaching. A number of different text types are identified in the analyzed mathematic textbooks and the most common ones proves to be practical requests and instructions which in many cases exceed 50 % of the texts in the mathematic textbooks. The analyzed texts are also very short and incoherent which can be assumed to influence students understanding of them negatively.Keywords: Reading comprehension, mathematics, the early years of elementary school, mathematic textbooks, text types.