The use of variation theory as a tool for designing lessons has been widely applied and received a lot of attention e.g. in mathematics education. More limited attention has been given to the use of variation theory as a means to analyze teaching and learning. This theoretical paper addresses the connection between the afforded and experienced variation when analyzing teaching and learning with a variation theory framework. Variation theory is in this case used as a tool for analyzing the relationship between teaching and learning, exploring the enacted, and lived object of learning. The connection between what is afforded in teaching and what students learn, can in this way be described in commensurable terms. With examples from a study about students’ learning of number relations in mathematics in first grade, we highlight this connection by illustrating differences identified in the teachers enactment of the same task, and what the students’ learned.