My reflection...

I must say for sure that the past few tutorials had really broaden my view on Mathematics in particular to the topic on Arithmetic. Thoughts have been constantly provoked throughout the lesson which I felt that it was a better way of learning as compared to a one-way tutorial session (i.e. tutor keeps talking with minimal interactions among the class).

By crafting lesson using the TfU package (teaching for understanding) will definitely benefit students in a long run.   But for sure, we will not be able to design TfU package for almost all the topics due to time constraint. So in this case, how should we decide what topics to be covered under the TfU package? Should it be based on how important the topic is or should it be based on how interesting the topic will be for the students?

As in the case of the algebra discs, I am just wondering whether students in future will be overly reliant over it? Given a question e.g. [-3(-2)+4]/3, will they be able to solve it immediately? Or will they spend time breaking up the expression into separate terms so as to try to fit into algebra discs. By the way, I found this journal paper online "ALGEBRA DISCS: DIGITAL MANIPULATIVES FOR LEARNING ALGEBRA" written by MOE Algebra Team which may be useful to some of you. Below is the site for downloading:
http://tsg.icme11.org/document/get/264 


Jacqueline