Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Day 2- on Whole Number

Day 2- On Whole Numbers

It was insightful as we learnt about the "type" of numbers we have been teaching and encountering with daily. The terms we talked about today can be confusing! But once we have examples coupled with the terms, we are less likely to mix them up!




1. Ordinal Numbers ( eg. 6th in place)

2. Nominal Numbers (eg. Player 6 won the race!)

3. Cardinal Numbers (eg. There are 6 sweets in the jar)

4. Numbers for measurement purposes (eg. The boy is 6 years old.)


Problem 5

The video of "As I was going to St Ives" - Sesame Street helped to emphasize a strong and important point in Math. The people, sacks, cats and kittens mentioned have viewers confused about what the question posted was really about.

In actual fact, they only wanted to know how many people were going to St Ives!
Answer: 1 man and his 7 wives = 8 people.



Just like how this picture shows how dogs and cats can't be put together, we should NEVER add things of different categories together! 

1 dog + 1 cat = No possible!
Unless you are looking for the number of animals....
Then 1 dog + 1 cat = 2 animals 


Also, preschoolers should start exploring with counting of the same nouns so they will understand the concept of Adding the same kind of things together.






As we did Problem 6, I simply started playing with no pre-calculations for winning. When we discussed how the number that we decided to count down by affects the winner and loser of the game, i began to see a pattern emerging.

There were a set of "bad numbers" for each count down number chosen and if it were to be my turn when there were the amount of "bad number" beans, then I would SURELY LOSE!


As our group of three ( Clare, Michelle, Lydia) explored with the beans, we also tried playing with 3 players and were able to predict the loser of the game better too!




Problem 7 had us thinking about counting in different ways using 10 frames. We experimented with 3 sets of 10 frames and thought of different number compositions to make 18.



In a more creative manner for the use of preschool settings, we can use objects such as egg trays as 10 frames for children to explore with.





Lastly,  knowing these are very useful information for us to understand how children learn! :

Pre-requisites to learning how to count

1. Knowing how to classify
2. Knowing how to rote count
3. Understanding 1 to 1 correspondence


Giving children a variation of number sets helps them to grasp the conceptual understanding of cardinal numbers too!
 Example: Sets of 3 in variation.


I am glad I learnt a whole lot of new things about whole numbers! :)

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