Day 1 Journal

After such a long time away from doing mathematics and besides introducing mathematics activities to the children in my class, today's session really made my brain work! The experiences provided made me want to work on it to find out the solutions.
Firstly was the tangram! It's fun to manipulate and move the shapes to form rectangles. Through this, I see that math can be open ended enough to have more than a way to solve.  

Next, using Dr Yeap's name to find out which letter is counted 99th. It's really cool to see the patterns as I counted. There can be different ways to solve it. The very first one that I thought of was using division. I then moved on to count one by one. That's where I saw the repeated patterns and I stopped to count through the pattern! Look!

The third activity helps me to see how children can move from concrete to pictorial to abstract when learning math. First I manipulated the paper to fold, then to see if the lines formed any equal parts (pictorial). After which I needed to know if they were equal abstractly, but I can find out the equal parts concretely when I cut and overlap the pieces to see.

So, math learning is looking for patterns and visualization.  It's built on from our prior knowledge and with opportunities for hands on too!