Final Reflection on Pre-Kindergarten Maths Teaching
Final Reflection on Pre-Kindergarten Maths Teaching
Having done fairly well, in emotional, social and cognitive development the next visit focused more on physical, language and communication development to boost the attainment of common core objectives on preschoolers. In this regard, together with learners of her age in the class, she was to participate in some games: “Bounce and Catch!”, “Race to Fill the Cup!” and “Match the Object!” . In the first phase, in the “Bounce and Catch!” I modified the game to suite the learners of age between 3-5 years. The learners were required to pick certain objects such as ping pong marbles, oranges, bear dolls, bananas, elephant dolls and so forth from the tray after hearing their names being mentioned when I played the radio. This game was important to boost vocabulary acquisition for the objects that would be used in the subsequent games. In the second phase, I had marked several places on the pitch to represent a bigger circle along which the young learners could position themselves as their homes. Further I had kept handball and tennis balls at the centre of the circle. When the music played, they were supposed to move and get the balls to kick as they return home. When it stopped playing they were supposed to freeze the balls. A person who reached first at home with the ball was the winner.
Although some learners like Grace somewhat struggled with bigger balls, they did it well with smaller balls.
In the “Race to Fill the Cup”, I gave everybody his cup to fill with objects that resembled in shape those that I pointed on Ipad. The person who filled the cup the fastest was pronounced the winner. In this regard, the learners filled the cups with marbles, and Grace did well. When the cups had been filled to brim, the learners counted the marbles to realise the number could fill them. Although counting could be seen somewhat complex, Grace managed to count them up to 25.
In the “Match the Object”, I placed cards of various shapes on one table, and told them to match with the red shape that had been drawn in their trays. If a tray had a rectangle shape, they were supposed to place rectangular cards in it. After they had picked all the cards, we verified each individual’s cards to ascertain their shapes. Despite the fact that nobody made errors, out of 100 rectangular cards that were in the pool, Grace had picked 18 of them emerging the second after her colleague who had collected 23 of them. The second phase of the game involved learners matching objects according to their sizes. While in the pitch, the teacher had put a mixture of small balls and big balls at the centre. Learners were supposed to pick the balls from the centre and put them where similar balls in sizes were at home. Just like other learners Grace participated very well in this game, and she could match the balls according to their sizes. The next phase of the game involved matching objects with their colours. I had put a hip of ping pong marbles of different colours at the centre from where the learners could choose. I divided them into five groups each with three learners and its tray. Each tray had been painted a certain colour that matched colours of some marbles. Therefore the groups were to compete by increasing the number of marbles at their homes as the radio counted from 1 to 20. Taking into account that the marbles were so many, the learners could not have exhausted all of them by transferring to their homes. When the radio counted to 20, they had to stop for colour verification and counting. All groups of learners had identified correctly the marbles with their corresponding tray according to colour. However, the Grace’s group emerged the first with 60 correctly placed marbles.
Combined Observations
The study featured a four-year-old pre-kindergarten learner called Grace at Mary Bob Learning Academy in Brooklyn. Her teacher had performed an assessment that showed that she had difficulties in geometry concerning understanding and relating shapes. Therefore, I devised various activities under approaches of IMPROVE method that the learner underwent to help her overcome the difficulties in learning. During the activity of identifying fruits that were similar to certain objects, Grace could identify oranges and objects of similar shapes and colours because she was familiar with them. However, she could not perform the same task well when I used open-ended questions, as it was the case with closed-ended questions. When I introduced the activity of matching fruits with their shapes on the blackboard, it was observed that Grace had understood colouring and matching fruits according to their colours and shapes. In the activity that involved matching objects according to their sizes, it was noted that since she liked dolls she could easily collect them according to their sizes and colours. During a community walk, I observed that she knew to differentiate mixed colours from plain colours. However, the activity of filling cans proved somewhat complex due to mechanics involved. In this regard, Grace would complete the task if she were well monitored and guided.
It was also found that learning thrives when the social relationships among learners and between teacher and learners are good. When Grace entered the class her conversation with teachers and other students were good, which increases her general mood for learning. Consequently, when she was placed in a group with others to perform tasks that involved identifying objects with similar shapes, colours and sizes, she seemed to perform them very fast. In the world of Maths, it was observed that the learner could not look at objects and recognise their number at once, but she had to visualise each of them to reach their total number. When I introduced a one-to-one method correspondence, I could easily help the learner to learn counting with a lot of easiness and accuracy. However, she was unable to remember the previously deciphered number, which forced her to recount the same objects to reach it again.
Upon several repetitions, Grace was able to reach the number of objects without involving herself in recounts. It was also observed that the repetitions enabled her to realise groups that had more or fewer numbers of objects. It indicates that an early introduction of number concepts to this kind of learners will enable them to be good at maths operations such as additions and subtractions. However, the most salient observation is that the student could easily count objects from 1 to 10, simply because she had memorised the names of such numbers.
In the fourth visit one can note that physical activities, language and communication exercises can be much helpful in boosting cognitive development of a child in a suitable social environment that enhances positive emotional development. It is important to note Mathematics usually involves a person carrying out instructions to perform particular tasks. These instructions are dependent on one’s language and communication skills. Moreover, some instruction whose mechanics are too involving will need that a student involves in physical exercises, but with activities that strengthens what he learnt in class as already seen in the Fourth visit. Such activities will strengthen her psychomotor processes to perform maths instructions that involve somewhat complex mechanisms.
Approaches
My approaches for this kind of learners were engagement, creativity and imagination, curiosity and initiative and persistence. By engaging them, I made sure that they interacted with many materials in multiple learning and playing activities. In this case too, I used various testing theories, with learners engaging in many problem solving activities so that they could demonstrate increasing awareness in the subject.
Boosting creativity and imagination involved experimenting with many activities, both inside and outside the class, but within their scope. In this case, learners could identify many more materials that added clarity on the understanding of the geometry lesson. By putting Grace with her peers to do some novel assignments, it was eminent that she forged relations with them and sought assistances on how they could complete some tasks ostensibly to emerge victorious. Nonetheless the learners at that early stage could communicate many solutions and pick the best one to complete their tasks.
On curiosity and initiative I strived to use materials that supported their curiosity to learn more such as elephant dolls and those that enhanced their initiatives to participate in learning like oranges. By involving them in physical activities that employs different sizes of the balls, the students could willingly explore their differences without being told. Learners also attempted to rearrange marbles in the bottle to realise how many of them could fill them. Persistence approach involved maintaining activities that fostered objectives of my geometry lesson. In this regard, all the activities were geared to help the learner at that early stage differentiate objects according to their sizes, colour and shape. Persistence also involved modifying some of the strategies that seemed complex to learning so that simpler ones could be used to enhance quicker information processing for the learners to attain their learning objectives.
