Day 1

Today is the first lesson of elementary maths. I was actually looking forward to the lesson, hoping to gain more knowledge of teaching mathematics to young children.

I enjoyed the problems that Dr Yeap posted and began to reflect on how I looked at maths problems. I tends to look for a pattern between the numbers and try to solve the problem by trial and error.

I liked the card trick problem as I had the chance to explore with concrete materials and realised that basic mathematics skills can be used to engaged high-level thinking. Maths is simply magically!

The "shredder" problem actually got me stuck for a while as I can't visualise that both shredder work at the same time. From this exercise, I reflected that both children and adults need concrete materials to explore and play with.

There are also many strategies that can be used to solve a problem, just like the Tangram. For instance, there are several ways of forming a rectangle using different shapes. From this activity, it gave me an opportunity to explore and play with the materials and the discussion with my classmates brought a different angle to the way I think when putting the pieces together to form a rectangle.



 In short, learning mathematics is fun and I must really say that I had a lot of fun in class today!