MR Tracker Lessons
MR Tracker is aimed at addressing the requirements of active learning:
Active learning engages and challenges children’s thinking using real-life and imaginary situations. It takes full advantage of the opportunities for learning presented by:
- spontaneous play
- planned, purposeful play
- investigating and exploring
- events and life experiences
- focused learning and teaching
Therefore there is not a magic formula for a good lesson.
However good numeracy lessons follow will these guiding principles:
- Teaching approach is enquiry based
- Teaching is informed by assessment
- Teaching focuses just beyond the cutting edge of child’s knowledge
- Teachers exercise professional judgement in selecting from a bank of teaching procedures
- Teacher understands children’s numerical strategies and deliberately engenders the development of more sophisticated strategies
- Teaching involves intensive ongoing observation and continual micro-adjusting
- Teaching supports and builds upon children’s intuitive, verbally based strategies
- The Teacher gives provides the sufficient time to solve the problem and reflect
- Children gain intrinsic satisfaction from their problem solving, their realisation that they are making progress, and from the verification methods they develop.
Here is an example of an enquiry based approach to learning:
This task (usually shown on paper as 4+=6) is a complex one which most teachers struggle to teach. The reality is, that if children are given time to understand the problem using concrete materials and then screens, they will be able to make their own sense of the problem and then develop their own strategies for solving it. It is only complex when a teacher tries introduce a strategy that children do not have the experience to understand.
It is important to point out that the child in this clip is in his first week of P1 and has never had any teaching of numeracy strategies. He is solving the second task based on his experience of the first task. As his experience with number widens he will be able to use more sophisticated strategies to solve the task.
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