In this paper, we explore how learning experience can best be described and relate to the teaching enactment so as to inform teaching practices in specific contexts. Two lessons dealing with the same topic in Primary 4 in Hong Kong schools were videotaped and a post-lesson diagnostic worksheet was given to the students. The aim of the study was to identify differences between the two lessons in what was made possible for learning on the topic, and to relate those differences to students’ perception and outcomes in learning. The data collected were analysed from the theoretical assumption that “variation” in the “object of learning” is essential to creating learning opportunities in the classroom. The results showed a critical difference in the way the teachers handled the object of learning. This was in turn found to have contributed to the opening of different “patterns of variation and invariance” in and thus, different possibilities for learning the object of learning. This difference was also reflected in the students' report of their perception and outcomes in learning.