Friday, September 2, 2011

Reading Your Blogs

Photo Credit: Vasandy

Today I read two blogs. Vicky's pre-course blog entry was highlights key ideas discussed. It is comprehensive. Her course blog entries (which is all-in-one) gives a glimpse into what happens in class with slivers of her own experiences with those activities.

Vasandy's daily entries are interesting reads especially her observations of how her kids respond to tasks. It is important to combine authentic observation with formal learning in professional learning. Even realizing that a ruler does not start with zero and then figuring out how to use it to measure the steps is something that cannot be achieved if we do not include authetic learning experiences such as this. Measuring a line on a worksheet does not pose such a challenge.

A Maths Trail is when students go to different stations and carry out mathematics learning using the environment. The tasks at the MRT Station is an example of a task in a Maths Trail. To follow up on Vasandy's thoughts, what are the things that students can learn in a maths trail task compared to a paper-and-pencil task. Think about what additional learning that takes place during the practical-based tasks than if that was a paper-and-pencil task.

Anyway, why does a ruler not start with a zero? Janica offered a possible reason. See Comments.

Thursday, September 1, 2011

Make Up Work for Absentees

If you are absent for a session, you are required to

(1) solve these problems and submit them - you may need to consult a classmate to find out the details; in cases where the Lesson is not a problem, to describe the main idea of the Lesson (you can find out the Lessons that we did in each of the six sessions);
(2) make short notes of three main learnig points from the lessons you missed (you can read the relevant chapters in the textbooks; in each session we did either whole numbers, fractions, measurements or graphs)

Please submit make-up work when you hand in your Final Assignments. If there is no make-up work for the sessions you were absent, you would be considered to have incomplete learning for this course.