Problem Solving in relation to Environment-based Task

Chapter 3 and 4 of the textbook provide me a good insight of why we should TEACH THROUGH PROBLEM SOLVING.

"Good problems will integrate multiple topics and will involve significant mathematics" (Van De Walle, Karp, & Bay-Williams, 2009, p.32). That set me thinking of the challenges to plan a meaningful lesson for my children. Am I not doing the right thing so far?

I found my answer from the phrase, "children are learning mathematics by doing mathematics!" (Van De Walle et al, 2009, p.33). When we plan our lessons, we always plan according to the children's level of development, and most importantly, what they are interested to learn.

I agree that teachers require a paradigm shift when we want to teach through problem solving. In fact, I have to learn more ways on how to engage the children to learn content eagerly. On the other hand, it is imperative to prepare learning materials and select appropriate manipulatives if I want the children "to learn content by figuring out their own strategies and solutions" (Van De Walle et al, 2009, p.34).

I am teaching the Nursery 2 children this year; a fantastic group of children! Each of them has a different learning style and different level of development (and they should be!). Now, it is time to rethink and redesign my teaching methods. A major shakeup time for me!

I had a good understanding of chapter 3 and 4 contents when we were carrying out the environment-based task. It is not just trying to find learning contents to teach from our environment or find any environment and try to fit it to our learning contents that we deemed fit.

After reading the textbook, I realised the Three-Phase lesson format is also applicable to our environment-based task.

Firstly, the BEFORE phrase of a lesson must be clearly established. From our daily experiences with the children, we need to understand what interests them, what are their prior knowledge and experiences, and are they ready to problem solve with me?

During the DURING phrase, we are just like the students, excited and ready to GO and tried to find the environment suitable for our learning contents. In the AFTER phase, we SHARED ideas and reflected on what we have created for the children.

The age group that we are targeting for our environment-based task was the Kindergarten 2; as the content initially planned for was numbers and operations - to learn addition and subtraction. The objective of using the nine "squares" on the metal gate was to get children to fill up the spaces using either addition or subtraction of whole numbers. In fact, we had fun trying to outwit each other to complete the nine squares.

During the AFTER phase, we reflected and realised that the contents can be modified to "make the task accessible to all students" (Van De Walle, 2009, p.65). In this case, if we want to teach the Nursery 2 class, we can ask the children to complete the nine squares by filling unrepeated numbers from 1 to 9. In fact, we can scaffold their learning by increasing the number of squares, as long as the children are having fun learning.

During our reflection stage, we realised that the metal gate is a fantastic learning tool for charts and graphs learning too. Thus, learning is multi-leveled and we can integrate multiple topics for this simple learning material.