This incident happened during the day that I was not suppose to teach. It was a numeracy lesson and the outcome was to teach children how to take a way from a group of objects (subtraction).
Purpose: I needed to find the suitable way or tool to introduce this idea to children because I used three different ways to teach them this concept
1- Using little blocks to take a way certain number of blocks and find out the answer
2- Using dry-erase pen and a small board for each child then to write numbers they chose to subtract.
3- Behaviouristic way of writing the same numbers all together to subtract.
Data: After this focus activity I reflected my lack of expereince to Ms. C. and after a small disccusion about what went wrong she said it is natural that I struggle in this area because subtraction is an advanced concept for children to get and it has to be either broken down using manipulatives or to keep modeling the activity untile children predict answers or something like that.
Analysis: No idea worked well and this group of children got board because of two reasons:
1- They refused to sit and continue the activity when I asked them and they were restless.
2- I took almost the 45 min to teach only one group rather that 2.
However, when I tried using manipulatives i.e little blocks, I noticed hints of comprehetion but it was after they got board and have had it with my ways of trying to reinforce this concept.
Conclusion: I belive that I should have used little blocks at the begining because I wasted the time trying to do it perfectly. I also agree with my mentor's suggestions (in the data).
Hello Ayesha, sorry to hear about this. You don't really say what went wrong here. However, I do think that Miss C is correct that manipulatives are required all the way for numeracy work at this age. How long was the Whole Class Introduction? I wonder what you did that made the children bored. Was the lesson too focused on you trying to explain the concept of subtraction?
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