Bukit View Primary School Primary 5 Team

This is the Lesson Study in Primary Mathematics: Implementation course. BVPS Team 1 (Upper Primary)has completed their lesson-planning stage with one of the sessions facilitated by me. They have selected as a research theme to develop confidence in problem solving.

The research lesson and post-lesson discussion was on 24 May 2010.

The team found that the manipulative and group setting made students more confident and they participated more. There were questions about if this also led to learning. This is one of the focus of the second cycle research lesson.

It was also found that students had difficulties cutting up the bar model after drawing them. In the lesson revision meeting, teacher were led to see that there are different categories of this skill - cutting 2 bars into 4, cutting 2 into 10 and cutting 2 into 5. The team will work out if they have included all situations in the lesson and the order in which the tasks will be used.

I look forward to the second cycle lesson on 30 August 2010.

Princess Elizabeth Primary School

The research lesson was on the topic of money. The research theme was on curiosity to facilitate the problem-solving process. When I met the team during the lesson planning stage, I asked questions about what tools / strategies had been put into the lesson to evoke the sense of curiosity in the learning / solving process.

Thanks to Joyce, the research teacher, Mee Eng, the facilitator and the kids in the class for the learning experience.

This is what I learnt about curiosity in the learning process. I saw the kids, initially, not curious about their own responses. They were asked to find the number of ways to purchase a $2, $2.50 and $4 items using exactly $20. When they tried 5 of the $2 items and 2 of the $4, they correctly found that they had spent $18. But they did not react to this findings. Why were they not curious how they could use this to generate a possible solution (say, by getting a $2 item)?

However, halfway through a boy wondered aloud if getting another item would help. Then a girl and another boy went to do the same and generated a solution. Another girl did not see what they were on about. But when it was carried out she thought it was a great idea - "You are troublesome but very smart" this girl said to her friend who used the $18 response to get a solution.

The post-lesson disucssion was dominated by ideas about obstacles to the kids being curious about what they did. Among the reasons - lack of understanding of the task, pre-occupation with their groupwork roles, lack of understanding of terminologies such ans 'ways' and 'combinations' and a couple others.