Lecture 1 Reflections

On Monday, we had lessons on tangram and we did activities where we need to use the tangrams to form rectangle. There are different shapes in tangrams and children will be able to develop knowledge on the different shapes, such as the name of the shapes. The activities we did in class are also essential in teaching children that there are more than one way to solve a problem. Rectangle can be form using just 2 pieces, 3 pieces, 4 pieces and even up to 7pieces of the tangrams.

In our second activity, we had to count the alphabet in the 99th position in our lecturer's name. I was able to get to the solution easily once I have spotted a pattern in the counting of the alphabets. I realised that 1,11, 21, 31 etc all falls in the first letter of the name and I just had to counted another 8times to get to the solution. The activity was pretty fun and it can help children develop the concept of looking for patterns.

The third and last activity we did in class were dividing a piece of rectangular paper into four equal parts. This activity were slightly challenging as we had to try different ways to divide the paper into for equal parts. And we learnt that one way to check if the parts are equal is to check if the parts overlap into each other perfectly. However, paper do not have to just overlap each other to be perfect.  I found one way in which I can check that the parts are equal parts and that is to find the area of the parts. We had a kind of folding whereby the paper were folded diagonally on both side of the paper to form four parts. We had a debate whether the parts were equal sizes as they looked different. I decided to find out the area of the different parts of the paper and found out that they were actually equal sizes!

From the activities, we developed knowledge on how children learn best. The first is to provide only scaffolding for the children, the second is to provide materials for the children and to prompt them only when necessary and the third one is to be a role model for the children.