Reflection

In the first workshop, I came to class with a perception of learning Mathematics is  only about practising and listening to the teacher's instructions. However, through out the EDB023 tutorial classes, I found out that it was all wrong.

In my school days in Malaysia, the scope of learning Mathematics was just about knowing the theories or steps in solving the problems and practised them out in the work book. However, now I realised that in learning Mathematics, children's understanding is the first priority as it will develop children mental computation. Thus, teacher need to put emphasis on the role of children's thinking in their mathematics learning, and build curriculum based on the development of children's concepts (Ell, 2002).

As young children until the age of 8 are lacking in the logical representation (Bredeltamp and Copple, 1997), learning should be more visualised and kinesthetically as it provides an opportunity for the children to explore and experience an authentic learning. Therefore, there are many strategies that can be utilised by the teacher to carter students' needs and develop children's computation. Play, online activities, everyday mathematical language and concrete representations are used to generate solutions and check for reasonableness of the solutions in learning (Queensland Studies Authority, 2008). Hence, this is what I experienced in my tutorial class as throughout the lesson, I understand the topic by 'doing' instead of receiving the input from the lecturer. Furthermore, it also develops mental computation as students will start looking and asking themselves such as 'did anyone solve this another way?' or 'what is the different between the first solution and this solution?'


In a way, children will become active cognitively and physically in the classroom.