Content and Activities:
Nothing is perfect in this world
even text books, as much as they have positive points there are negative
points. The same problem happen for grade 4 math text books, it has positive
points as well as negative points. This is what I will try to find on this text
book, so I will start from its outside then I will go deeper into its inside.
This book is composed of 2 parts having the same cover but holding different
lessons, part 1 contains half of the chapters and part 2 contains the second
half. This point is one of the negative and positive points at the same time in
this book; starting from the positive point I see that designers had a very
significant purpose behind dividing this book into two parts and I think it was
designed like this to make it more easier for students to carry because of its
very light size. While the negative point was the distribution of lessons between
the two parts, for example the first part of division found in part one while
the second part is in part two and this will cause a lot of confusion for
students. Now we enter into two introductions, the first one is about the book
authors and designers in general and the role of the teacher and the second
introduction is about the structure of the lessons. But what is mostly noticed
that teachers didn’t notice these introductions or even try to read them although
they include important ideas for teachers. For example they mentioned in the
introduction that this book can’t be used as the only resource for the transfer
of knowledge for this reason teachers have to take a look on them. After we
finish from the introductions we find ourselves entering a tall list of
chapters numbered from 1 to 36. The first negative point we can clearly noticed
is the wrong order of the lessons, for example chapter three is the hundreds
while chapter 7 is the millions and these two lessons are related to each other
directly, another example about decimals, chapter 22 is the first part of
decimal numbers while chapter 26 is the second part of decimals and the same
problem for other related lessons. This will lead students to lose their focus
and lose the connection between the lessons which will lead them for a lot of
confusion and this may decrease their opportunities for more understanding and
achievement.
Mathematics is different than other
subjects, it has different categories and each category is composed of
different concepts that also include some sub concepts. It is very important
for students to be able to identify these concepts and be alb to relate each concept
to its category, and because this the first year grade 4 students taught math
in English, so it is important to introduce them to those categories to learn
the differences among them . But in this text book they didn’t categorize the
lessons they put them all together randomly. On other hand the authors tended
to simplify each concept by divide it into more than one lesson, for example
the lesson of fractions is divided into three lessons; the first one is about
fraction itself, the second one is about comparing fractions, and the third
chapter is about the operations on fractions. This is one of the positive
points that help the teacher to focus on each concept and give it the
appropriate time and at the same time help students to understand and practice
these concepts effectively especially because these concepts are from the
basics that grade 4 students have to master.
Let us now enter to the content and
activities; we find that the first two chapters are not found in the standards
and at the same time they are not taught by schools. They place the lesson
“construction of solids” as the first chapter whereas students didn’t
introduced yet to the geometric shapes like square, rhombus, triangle, and
rectangle, so it is not appropriate to teach students solids before these
shapes and this is one of the negative points. In addition we find that the
second chapter “the calculator” is removed from all schools, because it is not
plausible to teach students how to use calculator and they are prevented from
using it, also if schools teach this lesson, they will limit or stop students
mathematical thinking and start relying totally on it. So, this is another point
that weaknesses this text book.
The structure of each lesson in this
book is very clear, simple, helpful, and effective for both teachers and
students. Each lesson starts with a small introduction about the lesson, then
they stated the objectives, after it we find an activity that prepare students
for the lesson concept followed by a clear and detailed explanation ended by
the results for the most important points in the lesson, then we find direct
exercises for the concepts in order to practice them, also we have self
evaluation that mostly is not solved by the teacher but it is left for students
to evaluate themselves and the answers for it are found at the end of the book,
and we continue to the problems which are mostly indirect questions and contain
a real life situation which is very helpful for students to understand the
relation between the concept and their real life, and finally there is a page
called “just for fun” and most of the time it contains critical thinking
problems. What I found also positively was the drawings used in each lesson
which help students to understand the question and more able to pick up the
givens and even if they didn’t help in solving the questions but they will make
the lesson more interesting for students particularly because they are kids.
One of the problems was with the
problems used inside each lesson, most of them were repetitive for the same
idea but with some changes in the situations or the given. Although it is
effective to use real life situations but at the same time they didn’t include
critical thinking that encourage and enhance students to think critically. Also
some of the problems didn’t fit with the objectives of the lesson and they are
not appropriate for students’ knowledge, for example in the lesson “the
millions” they include a problem contains multiplication whereas the objectives
didn’t include any multiplication and students didn’t take the multiplication
lesson yet, this will lead the teacher to delete this question and include
extra work sheets that mainly focus on the objectives and include higher
thinking problems that are more appropriate for students and lead for better
outcomes. Another point I noticed in this text book is the mistakes found in
some problems, for example in one of the activities they use the sign
“-“instead of the sign “÷” which will lead students to get lost and confused
between what the teacher is saying and what is written on the book.
No comments:
Post a Comment