Day 4 (4th April 2013)

                                                  

 

Have you ever experienced the process of categorizing information in order to learn something new? What kinds of things that you know now do you think you had to use assimilation or accommodation to learn?

 

While you may never have seriously thought about these things, a man named Jean Piaget is famous for having researched and pondered them. 

Assimilation and Accommodation always go together, we cannot have one without the other.

Assimilation is the process by which a person takes material into their mind from the environment, which may mean changing the evidence of their senses to make it fit. Whereas for accommodation, it is the difference made to one's mind or concepts by the process of assimilation. It is a process of modifying what we already know. We improve and construct the schema.

 

Today, we covered topics on area, division and multiplication. One takeaway was I realised when we do on division or multiplication word problems, sharing things among people should not be considered. Why? Because people often refers to a person, not a group.

The "Group" have to be a concrete item. We should first  teach young children on sharing concrete items such as paper plates, bowls, and goodies bag.

 

For example, we should say:

Mother has 24 sweets. She pack the sweets equally into 6 goodie bags. How many sweets are there in each goodie bag?

Instead of:

Father bought 4 apples. He shared it equally with 2 children. How many apples did each child get?

 

I also enjoyed playing with Tangrams today! I find that Tangrams seemed to be an overlooked educational tool in the preschools settings. Like building blocks, Tangrams can teach children about geometry and foster problem solving skills.
In addition, I learnt that we can use Tangrams to calculate areas! How nice if I have been exposed to such strategies back then during my school days.