To remind myself the next time I lose my patience while trying to teach D something - that patience goes a long way in make learning interesting :).
In general I don't consider myself a good teacher - not enough patience - and that's the first attribute necessary for teaching of course :(. Thankfully for me, D is usually a quick learner - she picks up stuff mostly from school and retains it and needs very little fine tuning from my end, so we survive without too many battles.
But on some days, I understand that she has not completely grasped what she has learnt in school - like Division for instance. When they do it in some sort of a game in school, she found it very easy to do, but the concept as such as was not yet clear. In their Maths workbook, they use a number line, with a bunny jumping backwards - say from 10 to 0 - jumps of 2 - count the no. of jumps(5) hence 10/2 = 5. Very nice way of demonstrating I thought, but my DD didn't quite agree. As usual I lost my cool for a few mins, then tried to breathe slowly and get into her head to see how she could understand it.
Finally I hit upon using the bathroom tiles, to demonstrate to her how to jump forwards and backwards in 2s and 3s and 4s and how the numbers progress accordingly. And Voila!! In the next 10 minutes, we had the homework all done :).
In general I don't consider myself a good teacher - not enough patience - and that's the first attribute necessary for teaching of course :(. Thankfully for me, D is usually a quick learner - she picks up stuff mostly from school and retains it and needs very little fine tuning from my end, so we survive without too many battles.
But on some days, I understand that she has not completely grasped what she has learnt in school - like Division for instance. When they do it in some sort of a game in school, she found it very easy to do, but the concept as such as was not yet clear. In their Maths workbook, they use a number line, with a bunny jumping backwards - say from 10 to 0 - jumps of 2 - count the no. of jumps(5) hence 10/2 = 5. Very nice way of demonstrating I thought, but my DD didn't quite agree. As usual I lost my cool for a few mins, then tried to breathe slowly and get into her head to see how she could understand it.
Finally I hit upon using the bathroom tiles, to demonstrate to her how to jump forwards and backwards in 2s and 3s and 4s and how the numbers progress accordingly. And Voila!! In the next 10 minutes, we had the homework all done :).
yes i am horribly impatient too. division - the very thought scares me! i have been almost banging my head on the keyboard in frustration over the last week as we struggle with reading (we do phonics on the computer, through a website). so did she finally get the concept right or was it only the homework that got done? :)
ReplyDeletehahaha good question Aparna! Not completely sure about that - will know only when the next division homework comes along :).
ReplyDeleteAll such things - reading, division - I can never remember how we learnt all that !!