A common Misconception

One of way to find out if pupils have understood the concept is to 'test' them. Pupils have been used to completing the following types of question. Look at the question below.

To test them, I added in an extra line to the question.

Pupils who have not understood the concept of place value or have a misconception, wrote 2 on the line(300 + 2 + 4). According to the pupil, there are 2 groups of ten so he wrote 2 down. However, another pupil pointed out the mistake and explained that it is 20 because there is no ‘tens’ after the blank (P2 pupils cannot really explain properly but the point is the child has understood).
Therefore with the aid of Multi-e toolbox, I tried to explain and demo to the rest what the child had explained about the missing ‘tens’ concept. After lots of practise, they finally understood.
Mission Accomplished.
Lessons that I have Learnt
1) At times, let them try out questions before you teach them a new concept oe expand on an existing concept.
If they get it wrong, they will wonder why and will start questioning and it is an excellent opportunity to develop ‘metacognition’. It also makes them pay attention....
2) Peer-evaluation and peer marking with explanation on why it is right or wrong, is good. It forces them to think about the answer and to justify their marking.

Tips for Parents.
1) Whenever possible ask your child to explain the answer that he/she has written regardless of whether it is right or wrong. When your articulates, your child is running through the process of arriving at the answer and you can check you child’s understanding of the concept.

Numbers to 1000

In my earlier post, I had mentioned about Place value. You may be wondering about its importance. Place value helps pupils understand the concept of numbers. It also helps them when they are comparing or ordering numbers (to be explained in the next post)
In my class, I always ask the pupils to put the digits in their ‘houses’. For instance in 135, 1 is the 100s house, 3 is in the tens house and 5 is in 1s house. So when they read the number, they read as one hundred and thirty-five. This helps pupils who have difficulty recognizing, reading and writing numbers (100-1000).

Refer to the diagram below:



So from this diagram, we have 135 or one hundred and thirty-five.
100 + 30 + 5 = 135

This ‘housing’ also helps pupils when they write the numbers in word numbers and vice versa as they are able to read aloud and write it down.

Parents you may wish to test your little ones in this concept tonight. This site allows them to practise what they have learnt. Please click www.learningbox.com/Base10/BaseTen.html
Remember to click on all 3 buttons on the left so that 1, 10, & 100 is highlighted in green.

Another site http://www.numbernut.com/basic/activities/number_4bar_1-1000.shtml to test their concept on being able to recognize the number words of 100-1000.

Below are some of the pictures. We are extremely lucky and privileged that we have a SMARTBOARD in our class. (thanks toP, VP & IT Dept) The SMARTBOARD, brings the whiteboard to live. It's like having a mouse on the board plus coloured pen plus recorder. Yes, it can record every movement made on the board. Today, I will show pictures and activties that have taken place so far.

If you wish to read more about place value, there is an interesting article in http://www.garlikov.com/PlaceValue.html. (take note, its rather long)