Blog 6

magic trick was performed by our lecturer, Miss Peggy Foo. We were fascinated and were eager how did she do it? She has a stack of big poker cards in her hands and wanted us to anticipate by spelling out the number from one to nine. When we spell out one, she flipped over no.1 and two, she too flipped over no.2 and were correct to number 9 and ten no need to count as it was the last number. We used trial and error method to get the right order of the cards, we also try various way like spelling out the number orally and then place the order of the number. eg.one and 1 is on the 4th position and two is placed on the 8th place and so on and so forth.

beside this activity, we have the paper cutting task to complete. We were shown first square with 2 fold and then cut at the right angle and then the second square with 3 fold and cut and the angle and the third piece with 4 fold and also cut at the right angle and pieces of square turn out to have different cutting. The lecturer want us to see the three square and think for the reason of the patterning and lastly want us to predict without cutting the 5 fold square. Though we were tempting to cut but we manage to predict on paper first and was excited to see the result!

Blog 5

What is "Functional" Mathematics? As stated in the text book," functional" is focus on life-related skills such as managing money, telling time,using a calculator, measuring and matching numbers or complete such tasks by entering a telephone number or identifying a house number. As a teacher of younger children, we need to help them to cultivate problem solving skills either by visualization, generalisation, metacognition, number sense and communication. Today lesson, we were given a problem sum of finding an angle from a diagram look like a parallogram attached to a small Issosceles triangle at angle C. From this problem, we have spend quite a long time to solve this problem and trying to find ways to go about to get the answer.

blog 4 Fraction is another topic that children have to know, they are know that when a cake is cut into half, it can share among two people but how many pieces must mummy cut to share equally among 6 people?
blog 4blog 4 Fraction is talking about a whole and divide the whole into numbers of equal parts. Most of us has the misconcept of fraction, for the half, we would say one out of two. In actual fact,1/2 of a cake is half of a cake and 1/3 is said to be one third.

blog 3
 The distribution of 7 eyes to minions(with 1 and 2 eyes) and how many ways can the eyes be distributed and to how many minions?

   way1 (1,1,1,1,1,1,1)  way 2(1,1,1,1,1,2) way 3(1,1,1,2,2) way 4( 1,2,2,2)

children need to know how to count to do the task above, they must know what is cardinal number and they could to group in two too.

Children need to be given isolated object as well as concrete materials to classify, match and sort in order to aquire basic math skills.

How do we help children to learn?
by teacher modeling and scaffolding children with questions and by providing variation and lastly by Concrete Pictorial Abstract (CPA) approach.

blog 2

http://interactivemaths.wikispaces.com/Whole+Number

Have fun with the activities on the web page above!

Session 2: Whole number From the text book it mention that children can count and expose to patterns in the number to 100, so children can think about a group of 10 as a unit. From the patterning of numbers, children can compose numbers ( putting number togehter) and decompose numbers ( taking number apart). The lesson 4 is helping us to see the group of 10 as a unit and putting numbers together and the lesson 5 and 6 helping us to see the numbers being taken apart. I feel that I am not an abstract thinker, cause I still need the help of a calculator to do the multiple sums. :P.

blog 1

Tangram is a set of seven pieces of different shapes with 5 different sizes of triangles ( 2 big,1 middle and 2 small ) and 1 parallelogram and a square to form a rectangle. We are to use any numbers of pieces to form rectangle, first we try to use two pieces and find it impossible and so we start with 3 pieces and continued with 4, then 5 and 6 and even used the 7 pieces. Tangram is very challenging and so I went to the net to source for one web source that can play with the young children and I came across the web address http://www.abcya.com/tangrams.htm Have Fun!

Another activity is the name of BAN HAR and which letter is landed on the 99th position, this activity is also interesting, as I do it the hard way by writing the number 1 to 100 below the name and from there slowly I see a pattern but other classmate could used calculation to count out the postion which landed on the N. (99 divide by 11 =9).

The last activity is using a small piece of rectangle paper and were told to imagine that this is a cake that we have to cut it into 4 equal parts. Interesting activity too .

Notes to Parents

What does it means to know math> Math is in every day of our life and letting the young children to know what is Math is essential to helping them aquire life skill. As they need to know numbers to tell of their house address and their own age and to put the correct numbers of candles on the birthday cake. Numbers are everywhere, be it in the school,at the bus stop and at home too. For our local mathematics context, It invloves for the young children to know the concepts of numbers and being able to apply the math skill in their real life situations.Thus playing with number should based on children's prior knowledge and we as teachers should cooperate with parents should provide opportunity for the young one to gain experience by doing and learning mathematics. What does it means to do mathematics Doing mathematics means letting the children generating strategies for solving problem and applying the methods to get a solution and checking for the correct answer. For children to problem solve, they have to think of many ways to dedrive to an answer. They also learn to express their ideas with words and pictures as well as concrete objects to clarify their problems. From the text book that I read (Elementary and middle school mathematics) mentioned that Mathematics is the science of Pattern and order Children know what is pattern from the animals that they see have pattern of them such as the giraffes and zebras have patterns on them, one with spots all over the body and the other have black and white stripes on the body. From the prior knowledge they have , they can further learn or do pattern with big and small relationship being introduce to them or sort the pattern with one or two attributes ( colour and shape). What does it mean to learn mathematics The learning styles of the children are base on Jean Piaget: Constructivism children learn by constructing and give meaning to the things they think about.Another theory by Lev Vygoysky was the Sociocultural Thoery.

the menatl processes exist between and among people in social learning setting (Forman,2003)

Importantly is how children used these strategies to learn and aquire knowledge on their own.