1st April 2013- EDU 330 Maths (Day One )


Today was the first day of our Maths class...I didn't know what to expect from our lecturer. I thought it was going to be a tough day for me ... fortunately.. it turn out well.

We when through:

     4 stages of carrying out instructions in Maths, as teachers we are to:
     * Teach children by modelling
     * Scaffold child's learning ( we prompt them by asking questions)
     *Provide children opportunity to solve the problems (if they cant, we can ask questions to prompt
       thinking and / or by modelling
     * Explaining (last stage of teaching)
       

Children learn by the CPA Approach. Which is through concrete, pictorial and abstract. Bruner theory emphasis that in learning anything abstract we need to do concrete learning first before going to visual(visual become important for understanding) and to learn the abstract ideas.

We had two interesting activities:
- Finding out which letters is our name is at number 99. This activity teaches us about various patterns we can use in counting and coming up with an answer. Almost everyone had the same answer.

- The other activity was a card 'trick'. This activity requires the use of mathematical language, spelling ,positioning of cards so that the stack of cards forms into a correct order of 1-10. It was interesting however a little challenging

I must confess that I will need to read more on terms such as cardinal, ordinal , rational, nominal to understand it better.