Primary 5

Topic: Animal with backbones

Sub-topic: Fish

The Set up

Unit goal:

To understand the characteristics of fish (animal with backbones).

Learning objective:

At the end of the lesson, the pupils will be able to:

1.      classify 5 fresh water fishes and 5 sea water fishes;

2.      examine and identify the characteristics of fish;

3.      explore different function of fish;

4.      construct and label the parts of the fish correctly; and

5.      develop their interest of the colour and the beauty of fishes.

Materials for the lesson:

1.      to introduce the lesson, teacher use a song that describe the characteristics of fish using laptop and speaker;

2.      to teach habitat, characteristics and functions of the part of a fish, teacher use laptop, media projector (PowerPoint) and video about fish;

3.      to allow pupils to get extra information about fishes, teacher use internet access, video and handouts containing trivia questions; and

4.      to enable enjoyable learning environment, teacher use a 3-by-3 board, pictures, questions cards and whiteboard marker and speakers;

The Lesson

The Hook:

Teacher uses song and video to attract students’ attention and PowerPoint to stimulate the pupil’s interest rather than just using the textbook itself during explanation. The PowerPoint includes explanation of habitat, characteristics and functions of the part of a fish for the pupils to learn and understand. Then, pupils are allowed to use internet access to broaden their knowledge about fish. The main focus of this lesson is to expose the pupils about fish and thus widen their understanding. Furthermore, in the middle of the lesson, the teacher will conduct a tic-tac-toe game using 3 by 3 board so that it allows pupils participation in the class.

Exploration and Practice:

First, the teacher let the pupils investigate and find out everything about fish such as the characteristics of fish by observing the real fish and using internet resources. It is then followed by game to test whether the pupils understand what they have learned. Pupils can also ask questions if they are in doubt about the lesson. The teacher will then re-teach certain part of the lesson, which includes explanations until the pupils understand. This is to make sure that the lesson objective will be achieved. After that teacher shows video to the students and teacher will also give handouts and worksheets as homework to the pupils to ensure that they really understand the lesson of the day.

Summary:

Teacher and pupils review the topic of the day. Teacher gives homework to pupils.

For PowerPoint presentation please refer this link http://www.sendspace.com/file/omjpng

For lesson plan, internet access activity, tic-tac-toe and homework worksheet, please refer this link http://www.sendspace.com/file/2e7ozj

Primary 2

Topic: Geometry

Sub-topic: Pattern of shape

The Set-up

Unit goal:

To understand the patterns of shape according to shapes, sizes, colours and orientation.

Learning objectives:

At the end of the lesson, the pupils should be able to

i) continue the pattern given, that is, in the form of shapes, sizes, colours and in sequence.

ii) to build pattern of shapes of their own choices by themselves.

iii) recognize the repetitive pattern and symmetrical pattern.

Materials:

The use of ICT (CD-ROM – PowerPoint form), plastic shapes blocks of different colours and sizes.

The Lesson

The hook:

Teacher starts the lesson by asking 6 girls and 6 boys to stand in front. The teacher will divide the pupils into 2 rows. First row, 3 boys and 3 girls will be arranged alternately, (b g b g b g). Second row, the pupils will be arrange by 3 girls and 3 boys, (g g g b b b). Then teacher will clap her hands twice and knock on the desk repeatedly.

Exploration:

Teacher use PowerPoint (refer to link) to capture students understand and explore the concept.

Practice:

Teacher divides the students into groups and gives them the plastics shape for them to discover some pattern.

First activity:

1.    By asking them to pick 2 types of block shapes and make a pattern of symmetrical.

2.    By asking them to pick 2 colours of the same shapes and make a pattern of repetitive.

Second activity:

1.    Asking the pupils to choose 3 shapes with the same colours to make symmetrically pattern.

2.    Asking the pupils to choose 3 different colours with the same shapes or size.

Summary:

Teacher gives individual task to each student to test their understanding. The students are required to do some pattern problem through a short quiz. Finally, the teacher review the lesson today and also asking the pupils to give some examples of 2-d shapes in the class that they can make patterns.

For PowerPoint presentation please refer this link http://www.sendspace.com/file/b8u7la

For lesson plan (commonly used lesson plan) please refer this link http://www.sendspace.com/file/kxl8e5

Primary 5

Topic: Sound

Sub-topic: How sound travel

The Set up

Unit goal:

To understand sound can travel through solid, liquid and gas.

Learning objective:

At the end of the lesson, the pupils will be able to

i) infer that sound travel through solid, liquid and gas;

ii) recognize that sound cannot travel through vacuum.

Materials for the lesson:

i) to prove that sound travel through solid, we use string, plastic cup (already being punched with small hole), desk or bench;

ii) to prove that sound travel through liquid, we use small container (half filled with water), spoons and balloons (fully filled with water and watch);

iii) to prove that sound travel through gas, just ask the pupils to speak.

The Lesson

The Hook:

Using PowerPoint as one of the learning tool to stimulate the pupil’s interest rather than just using the textbook itself. The PowerPoint will include different types of sounds for the pupils to guess. Then, pupils will review how sound is produced, loud and soft sound, the sound from different distances. The focus during this lesson is about how sound travels. In order to attract the pupil’s interest in learning, the teacher will give hands-on-experiments to be done during the lesson.

Exploration and Practice:

First, the teacher let the pupils investigate whether sound can travel through solid, liquid and gas. Follow by experiment(s) to show that sound travels through solid, liquid and gas. Pupils can ask questions if they are doubt. The teacher will then explain again until the pupils understand. This is to make sure that the lesson objective will be achieved. Teacher also give additional information that sound cannot travel through vacuum. Teacher will also give handouts and an exercise to the pupil’s to make sure they really understand the lesson for the day and related to sound.

Summary:

Review the topic on sound.

For PowerPoint presentation please refer this link http://www.sendspace.com/file/5j1lgn

For lesson plan (commonly used lesson plan) please refer this link http://www.sendspace.com/file/cnmznv

For homework worksheet please refer this link http://www.sendspace.com/file/n9r4×2

For test worksheet please refer this link http://www.sendspace.com/file/qdyrek

Introduction

When we ask people about what is mathematics, they will say it is all about numbers. Mathematics in its purest sense is actually abstraction knowledge. Thus, learning mathematics is always about abstract concept. That is why it is necessary for every student to understand the abstract concept as to learn mathematics successfully. But, this is the major problem and the main factor that causes the difficulty for many students who are struggling with mathematics recently. This might lead to even the basic mathematics concepts that many of the students find it is also difficult to understand.

Manipulative

The use of manipulative is a very popular approach that teacher had use nowadays. And it is becoming the trend of teaching. This approach helps students to understand the abstract concepts in mathematics better. The aim of manipulative here is to enable students and also teachers to represent concretely the abstract concepts that they are learning in mathematics class then to link with the concepts of their prior knowledge. Using manipulative, it benefits students across their grade level, ability level, and topics. In order words, using manipulative will makes sense for some topic in mathematics. Even in most of Brunei classroom, the mathematics teachers are trying so hard to use concrete manipulative to capture students’ understanding. Manipulative increases exploration possibilities to develop concepts and test hypotheses for students at all levels of ability.

Teacher should consider that every student should be given an opportunity to play with manipulative. Just a demonstration by a teacher is not sufficient to realize the students’ full potential and not in line with the theoretical rationale of their usage since they are meaningful to the extent they involve interactive activities. Sometimes, it is hard for the teacher to use manipulative object since manipulative should be carefully chosen with the levels of intended audience and the realistic models, such as 1 stick for the digit 1 and 10 stick together as digit 10 for base blocks, should be used in order not to mislead learners by causing misconceptions.

While it is virtually impossible to demonstrate a mathematical concept directly by the help of manipulative, it is likely for a learner to construct a concept or discover a mathematical relationship through appropriate use of manipulative with an adequate task. Fortunately, with the advent of the World Wide Web, it gives the advantage to the teacher and student that there is a new category of manipulative that might very useful, which is virtual. Thus, the use of virtual manipulative is one of the ways the student can learn mathematics better and also attract their interest in learning mathematics.

Virtual manipulative

According to Moyer et al. (2002: 373), virtual manipulative is “an interactive, web-based visual representation of a dynamic object that presents opportunities for constructing mathematical knowledge.” Basically, virtual manipulative is act as a digital “objects” that is almost similar to physical objects and it can be manipulated. Virtual manipulative will only work with the use of computer.

Some of the visual manipulative found on web sites hosting virtual manipulative provide an interactive environments where students could pose and solve their own problems to form connections between mathematical concepts and operations, and get immediate feedback about their actions that might lead them to reflect on their conceptualization. This is one of the aims of virtual manipulative. Thus, it shows the different between concrete manipulations and virtual manipulative where the students get the immediate result while doing mathematics using virtual manipulative.

Example of virtual manipulative for primary mathematics

This is some of the example that teacher can use in teaching students while online for some of topics in mathematics. Visual Math Learning is a free educational web site developed by W. Bateman, who indicates that the site features an interactive on-line tutorial for teaching elementary mathematics and basic arithmetic for grades K-12 at the pre-algebra level. What the teacher can do is just clicks on website address http://www.visualmathlearning.com/index.html.  In this website, it contains games, puzzles, interactive diagrams, and computer animated virtual manipulative that emphasize active learning concepts by visualization.

Another example is from http://www.visualfractions.com/, by Richard Rand. This is an online tutorial with instruction and interactive practice in identifying, renaming, comparing, and operating on specially for topic ‘fractions’, and it including mixed numbers (add, subtract, multiply, and divide). All examples in this websites are modelled with number lines or circles.  This site helps students in primary level, to picture fractions and operations on them.

While from website http://www.thinkingblocks.com/, it teaches children how to visualize and solve math word problems. Using interactive blocks and cubes, children create models that illustrate the underlying math concepts within the problems. Thinking Blocks combines guided instruction, video explanations, and independent practice to help young students in grades 3-5 develop strong problem solving skills.

Last example that I can give is from the website address http://www.mathplayground.com/index.html. In this site, there is animated characters created with Flash add to the appeal of this learning site for primary students.   Among resources are some virtual mathematics manipulative, such as a protractor, fraction bars, equivalent fractions, percents, a spinner for probability, function machine, pattern blocks, and a geoboard.

Barrier of using virtual manipulative in primary school

The main barrier of using virtual manipulative in primary school is that the absence of the internet connection. Not all schools in Brunei have this internet connection. This is the disadvantage for some of the schools. The absence of the internet connection leads to the absence of the use of virtual manipulative. This absence is due to the government budget since it needs a lot of money in setting up the internet connection. But there is some of the program that can be downloadable for example in website http://nlvm.usu.edu/en/nav/grade_g_3.html, the teacher can download free trial, use this download trial version and show it to the class.

Another problem is that, some teachers are lack of ICT knowledge especially the veteran teachers. Some of them prefer to use traditional way of teaching which is chalk and talk which they are strongly believe it is very effective.

Time is also the problem in conducting virtual manipulative. Teacher takes times to survey the websites for his or her students to use in the class. Teacher has to make sure the virtual manipulative websites he or she had chosen should match the topic taught by him/her that day. He or she has to instruct the students more frequently so that the students will not miss track while on line.

Conclusion

As a conclusion, virtual manipulative is actually giving opportunity to get the students familiar with mathematical representations and to help them to appreciate the meaningful applications of mathematics to solve real-world problems. In other words, virtual manipulative is also a version that demonstrates the real concrete manipulative.

Reference

Moyer, P. S., Bolyard, J.J. & Spikell, M.A. (2002) What are virtual manipulatives? Teaching Children Mathematics. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, Inc.

Chinese proverb quoted that: “I hear I forget; I see I remember; I do and I understand.” Thus, it is important for the teacher to give the children opportunity to understand by doing class activities for instance. Giving drawing and writing task is one of the ways. Teacher let the children to do their own things, which will make them understand more efficiently instead of the teacher do all the talking in the class, which might be boring. Some example of drawing and writing tasks for primary science and mathematics as follow: In teaching science as for the ‘environmental’ topic, teacher can ask his/her students to look around them and ask the students to find out and write what they can say about the environment. Which mean that the students draw the picture of what they see and describe what they draw, in their own words. Whereas for teaching mathematics, for example in teaching ‘fraction’, teacher can ask the students to draw a circle (which is easy than other shapes) and explain the meaning of the whole circle (which act as a whole number, 1) and half of circle is ½ which is fraction. This can be done after the teacher give explanation to the students. Another example that can be use is for the topic ‘time’. The students need to draw a clock and the hand of the clock. Then the students write the time, which represent by their drawing. To conclude this, teacher should remember that children learn best by using their senses therefore let the children do most of the lesson.

Portfolio is very useful for teacher. From portfolio, teacher may know the students’ weakness. Furthermore, teacher can try to help these students. Suggestion for student’s improvement: Teacher can use assessment to improve the student’s achievement and understanding. Teacher can give interactive websites and activity to enhance their mathematics learning. At the same time, teacher also can test the student’s understanding. For teaching number, it is better for the teacher use concrete material to represents the numbers at first, use number games for fun learning, bingo game for example so that the students get familiar and know the numbers better), sing a number song and etc.

Teaching is not always easy for teacher especially for the new teacher. Why did I say that? This is because I have experience in teaching children. Even a simple thing, you might feel it is not easy.

I have this experience of not having antivirus in my laptop. Oh god, it had been crack the system of my laptop. I had this virus named “brontok.”

UBD assignment is always about writing essay. So that day, I had just realized that every second I wrote my essay, the window always closed. I have known that after I had sent my laptop to be reformatted. The technician said its “brontok” virus. Might be it attack my laptop because I don’t have any antivirus or my antivirus is expired. This gives me an idea why it is important to have antivirus in the laptop.

Next is the one that I find, it given information of what is computer virus.

Source: http://avs.ae18.com/index.html

What is Computer Virus?

A computer virus is a computer program that can copy itself and infect a computer without permission or knowledge of the user. The original may modify the copies or the copies may modify themselves, as occurs in a metamorphic virus. 

A virus can only spread from one computer to another when its host is taken to the uninfected computer, for instance by a user sending it over a network or carrying it on a removable medium such as a floppy disk, CD, USB drive or by the Internet. Additionally, viruses can spread to other computers by infecting files on a network file system or a file system that is accessed by another computer. Viruses are sometimes confused with computer worms and Trojan horses. A worm, however, can spread itself to other computers without needing to be transferred as part of a host.

A Trojan horse is a file that appears harmless until executed. In contrast to viruses, Trojan horses do not insert their code into other computer files. Many personal computers are now connected to the Internet and to local-area networks, facilitating their spread. Today’s viruses may also take advantage of network services such as the World Wide Web, e-mail, and file sharing systems to spread, blurring the line between viruses and worms. Furthermore, some sources use an alternative terminology in which a virus is any form of self-replicating malware.

The term comes from the term virus in biology. A computer virus reproduces by making (possibly modified) copies of itself in the computer’s memory, storage, or over a network. This is similar to the way a biological virus works.

Some viruses are programmed to damage the computer by damaging programs, deleting files, or reformatting the hard disk. Others are not designed to do any damage, but simply replicate themselves and perhaps make their presence known by presenting text, video, or audio messages. Even these benign viruses can create problems for the computer user. They typically take up computer memory used by legitimate programs. As a result, they often cause erratic behavior and can result in system crashes. In addition, many viruses are bug-ridden, and these bugs may lead to system crashes and data loss.

There are many viruses operating in the general Internet today, and new ones are created and discovered every day.

Security problems with Microsoft’s dominant Internet Explorer browser helped pave the way for Mozilla Firefox to emerge as a perfect alternative for Web surfers. However, Firefox users should be aware that hackers can exploit software flaws and design features to launch drive-by attacks.

Steps:

Following are steps to disable various features in Mozilla Firefox. Note that some menu options may change between versions or may appear in different locations depending on the host operating system. You should adapt the steps below as appropriate.

The following configuration changes can disable various features and set up the browser to run in a secure state, limiting the damage from malware attacks.

To get started, select Tools, then Options.

You will then see an Options window that has a row of categories along the top. The first category of interest is the General category. Under this section, for instance, you can set Firefox as your default browser.

Under the Privacy category, you can select the Cookies subcategory. Here you can disable cookies or change your preferences for how the browser handles them. In general, we recommend enabling cookies for the original site only. Additionally, by enabling the option unless I have removed cookies set by the site, a web site can be “blacklisted” from setting cookies when its cookies are removed manually.

Many web browsers will allow you to store login information. In general, we recommend against using such features. Should you decide to use the feature, ensure that you use the measures available to protect the password data on your computer. Under the Privacy category, the Passwords subcategory contains various options to manage stored passwords, and a Master Password feature to encrypt the data on your system. We encourage you to use this option if you decide to let Mozilla Firefox manage your passwords.

The Content category has an option to Enable Java. Java is a programming language that permits web site designers to run applications on your computer. We recommend disabling this feature unless required by the site you wish to visit. Again, you should determine if this site is trustworthy and whether you want to enable Java to view the site’s content. After you are finished visiting the site, we recommend disabling Java until you need it again. The Warn me when web sites try to install extensions or themes option will display a warning bar at the top of the browser when a web site attempts to take such an action.

Press the Advanced button to disable specific JavaScript features. We recommend disabling all of the options displayed in this dialog.

The Downloads section has an option to modify actions taken when files are downloading. Any time a file type is configured to open automatically with an associated application, this can make the browser more dangerous to use. Vulnerabilities in these associated applications can be exploited more easily when they are configured to open automatically. Click the View & Edit Actions button to view the current download settings and modify them if necessary.

The Download Actions dialog shows the file types and the actions the browser will perform when it encounters a given file type. For any file type listed, click on either Remove Action or Change Action…. If you click on Change Action…, select Save them on my computer to save files of that type to the computer. This helps prevent automated exploitation of vulnerabilities that may exist in these applications.

Firefox 1.5 includes a feature to Clear Private Data. This option will remove potentially sensitive information from the web browser. Select Clear Private Data… from the Tools menu to use this privacy feature.

That’s it. Good Luck!

Source: http://www.pctipsbox.com/