I understood why we have been practising the "estimating/predicting" and "checking our prediction" kind of activities with our children from today lesson.
"Benchmark" is the key to it. Let's take a look at this question:
1) Can you tell me if this circle ( O ) is big or small?
Now think again. How do you find if the question is phrased in this way:
1) Can you tell me which circle is bigger? ( O or o )
Interesting isn't it? From this activity, i learnt that the concept of how big or how small will only make sense when we know the "benchmark" of the sizes.
Children relate to what they already know. They learn by constructing their own knowledge. We start teaching new knowledge from something that is realistic.
E.g. First we learn that this is a big cat, this is a small cat.
Then we move on to teaching children about a big animal and a small animal.
Finally we moved on to a more abstract thinking when the big cat is now a small animal when we compared it with a lion.
I realised there are many methods we can introduced to the children to teach the concept of "Who has more?" It all depends on teaching which methods will help the child to relate and see the idea of it. However, one question that has been bothering me is "How do we teach children about more than and less than. How many more? less by how many?" I understand the concept of using realistic concrete materials. The children are able to tell me who has more, who has less but when asked the question "How many more?" they gave me a puzzled look.
It maybe because they do not have the language to comprehend the meaning of my questions, or i have asked the question inappropriately. I do not know. Lastly, i like the "10 Frames" method in teaching children to learn about numbers without explicit teaching.
10 Frames
No comments:
Post a Comment