Daily Class Reflection

Session 4 – 25 August 2011

We are very used to getting approval for any little thing we do. Therefore as teachers we have trained our students to get approval from us. Now, the hit of today’s lesson for me is not to display any form of body language when students do some mistakes or achieve a correct answer. How to stop that???

I always felt that something is not finalised when Dr Yeap does not give any answers to the activities that we were engaged in during class. I was wondering why and I got my answer now. He is role modelling leaving the students to come up with their own decisions.  I feel that it could be sometimes difficult to leave kids without any form of approval. Alternatively, prompting students with questions and suggestions would make them think and reason out. Direct approval or disapproval could be avoided. I will have to try this out with my class before agreeing with this approach.

Classifying addition and subtraction into concepts of part – whole, change and comparison covers situations in which these skills are applied. I now have a better view of presenting the story sums to students. When students get to view it in these situations, better understanding takes place for the thinking process to be stimulated.

We explored fractions using materials to divide into equal parts. Fractions are not so difficult as I have always thought. Using concrete materials to see the parts made it very easy. Folding equal parts with a rectangle paper and further dividing it to smaller parts was interesting. Viewing different ways of folding equal parts was an eye-opener, especially four equal triangles in a rectangle.