1st Session Surprises!

One thing that strikes me in the 1^st session is how Dr Yeap made us learn Math the way old-school teachers will never dare to teach the students. Full of surprises and so much brain juice squeezed!

A simple introduction of Dr Yeap’s name turns to be a Math problem where the objective is to find the 99^th letter in the name. Similarities in the position of the letters in the names were spotted with teachers with similar number of letters in their names e.g. 5-letters name like AISHA; the 99^th letter is S; which is the 3^rd letter in the name.

Familiar yet not-being-used-often terms like rote and rationale counting, cardinal, ordinal, nominal and measurement numbers are some uses of numbers that teachers will often use when teaching Math. In relation to ordinal numbers (which has two positioning; in space and in respect to time), it is most interesting to note the mistake that teachers and sometimes worksheets will asked students, “ Who is 3^rd in the race?” when the picture is showing runners running towards a finishing line. The correct way to enhance children’s understanding of ordinal numbers is to ask, “ Who is 3^rd from the finishing line?”

The pre-requisites to counting that all teachers should know pertaining to children’s early understanding of Math concepts are:

1. Children should be able to classify
2. Children should be able to rote count
3. Children should be able to do one-to-one correspondence
4. Children should be able to represent the number of item of the last number that they utter.

Besides the intriguing Spelling Card trick (and gave me the idea to ‘trick’ the K2 children earlier this morning; they were amazed! Even the class teacher was in awe!), it was such a boss moment last evening when we did the Arrange Five Numbers and at first try, I put ‘5’ in the middle and got all the numbers to equal to 10.

From this lesson and a refresher for me, the rule of odd and even numbers are as such:

Even + Even = Even

Odd + Even = Odd

Odd + Odd = Even

Frankly, the brain was overloaded with too much not-so-new yet very interesting information/ tricks/ ideas/ concepts (whatever you may call it) last evening. Yet, I can’t deny that I’m looking forward to more ‘Ah-Ah’ moment in the days to come!