Number Stories
Writing number stories are not as easy as we think. Many considerations are needed in order to construct a logical question. Today we randomly wrote this addition number story based on the number 8 and 6. We started to build the story on a classmates favorite type of animal. Through the process we questioned ourselves and changed certain words. Later as the story was read out and more questions were posed, such as - Are there only these types of dogs in a dog pound? Are you sure these type of dogs will even be in a dog pound? What is a dog pound?
This got me thinking. Much as we thought of using something realistic such as dogs, but we did not think about the logical sense of the types of dogs or the place where the dogs will be. Another aspect which is important to pay attention to, would be the language. As teachers, we need to watch how we phrase our words.
Dr. Yeap mentioned about Mathematics & Real-life Situations - Contextual information will make the math problem complicated. There is a need to respect the students knowledge of the situations.
I read somewhere, where I can't remember!!! There was a question posed to a child - There were 20 sheeps, 10 jumped over the fence, how many were left? The child replied none. The teacher asked him to re-think as he didn't seem to understand the question. The child replied that the teacher didn't understand sheep, if one were to jump over the fence, the rest will follow.
