Reflction

Day 6: 31/08/2011

It was the final lesson that we had for our module and Dr. Yeap got us to do something different. One of the activities was to make a trip down to the nearest MRT station (Bras Basah), to measure the height difference between level one and the basement level using a ruler.

What my team did was to use the ruler the measure the height if each step. One step was measured to be about 14cm, which was followed by counting the total number of steps between the two levels. At first, we decided to count the number of steps per flight and multiply it by the number of flights of steps. There were 14 steps per flight and there were 4 flights of steps in total. However, after checking the number of steps between the 2 levels, we decided that we cannot multiply the number of steps by the number of steps per flight because we made a double count in between the flights of stairs which was not the accurate number of steps. So, we decided to count the steps by counting it from the top to the bottom of the staircase. We got 62 steps and multiply it by 14cm to get the height of the stairs to be 868cm. It was an interesting lesson as I’d never thought about doing a lesson on measurement at the MRT station.

The other activities that we did were, making a box small enough to fit exactly 15 kidney beans, and to do a bar chart “How we come to school”. These are interesting too as what amazed me was that all we need is a tiny box to fit 15 kidney beans! The bar chart was also another practical way to teach children about handling data using bar chart.

It was another fruitful day in class as I realized that there teaching mathematics does not have to be boring and it can be done in a fun and meaningful manner as well.