Week 10

Measurement

As an adult, if we were asked a question on ‘how long is one minute?’ our answer would typically and certainly be ’60 seconds’. But what if we ask this question to the young learners in their early childhood, would they be able to give the same answer as us? Looking at a learning Mathematics in early childhood, what are other possible answers for this question? One of this week’s workshop activities is ‘Perceiving One minute’. We explored many possible ways for the young learners to perceive time.

In my opinion, it would be appropriate for young children to be introduced to non-standard units of time before they proceed to the standard units of time. It is because the idea of learning itself, where it should move from a lesser complexity of ideas to a more complex one. Hence in an early childhood classroom, perceiving one minute could be done with variety of simple variables like:

• No of beads can be threaded in one minute
• No of unifix cubes can be stacked in one minute
• No of pendulum swings in one minute
• No of marching steps in one minute

Another activity could be done with young learners to perceive time is looking at how a pendulum swings. Strings with different length are used in this activity. You can ask children to roughly create a data table as below:



When all the data is collected, let the students investigate the relationships between the length of the pendulum and the number of swings made. (e.g. the shorter the length of the pendulum, the greater the number of the swings made).

* In order to get a more accurate result of the number of swings, students could be asked to record them twice and then find the average.




One-Handed Demonstration Clock

Krech (2000) in his article, It’s time! talks about the use of one-handed demonstration clock to help students learn what ‘the space in between the numbers’ all about. This clock focuses merely on the hour hand in time-telling. The language used with this one-handed demonstration clock is an easy language such as:

• About nine o'clock
• A little past nine o'clock
• Halfway past nine o'clock

A one-handed demonstration clock

The minute hand can later be added to the one-handed demonstration clock, after the students have had plenty of practice with the hour hand. Krech (2000) believes that focusing on the hour hand on its own helps the students gain stronger overall understanding of how the minutes hand functions.





Literature That Teaches

This week’s workshop captured my attention as I got to know a few story books that are meant to teach Mathematics to young children. One of the books is:

The Bad Tempered Ladybird


The topics focused in this book are time and size. It uses non-standard units to measure the size (the size of the ladybird is used to compare the sizes of other animals. The terms used are like big and bigger.)

The fist time that we read the book, we asked the children to listen carefully and to focus on what the ladybug might have learned through its adventures. For the second reading, we asked them to listen and watch for patterns. On a chart paper, we recorded each pattern that the children identified (Kelly & Burke, 1998).

Back in Malaysia, during my time as an early childhood learner, I was not exposed to this kind of book. Even nowadays, the use of story books to teach Mathematics is still not very significant. As a future teacher, I'll take the challenge to promote this kind of literature to the Malaysian classroom.





References:

Kelly, M. G., & Burke, K.(1998). A matter of grouchy time. Teaching Children Mathematics, 4(7), 404-407.

Krech, B. (2000). It's time!. Instructor, 109(5), 16-17.