“It is not the concepts that are easy or difficult, but how you present them!” – I remember reading it somewhere, long back. And every time I shared this view with other teachers, the last of the things they would do was trusting that it works! Even the teachers at non-conventional set ups were good only to look high upon this idea but not really daring to take this to their classrooms, to their students. This is what made me write this, sharing my recent experience teaching a seven year old prime and composite numbers.
As we were discussing multiplication, it was really fascinating to see how this second grade child Samir was so comfortable multiplying every time. I could celebrate almost every time I posed a question to him for the way he would adopt different strategies to compute – like when asked 14 taken seven times – he told that he would do 10 taken 7 times, and then add it with 4 taken seven times. After a few more similar rounds, I threw 19 taken 4 times at him. This time, like any other teacher I expected him to just extend the same procedure and replace the numbers. But to my surprise, he simply took 20 four times and subtracted 4! I was instantaneously thrilled at his capacity! And this pushed me facilitate his learning further, going beyond the conventional boundaries set by math curriculum or the schooling system!
I started asking him to generate all possible multiplication statements for a given product. This was ofcourse built on a good context of arranging his classmates during a morning assembly in equal length rows. As he successfully discovered all possible arrangements for a given number of kids, it just started becoming easier for him with time. And, here came the idea that for some number of kids such as 11, 13, 23, etc there was only two ways of arranging the kids – either one row will all, or one kid per row. And a name was later attached to these numbers – primes numbers. “But this wasn’t the same with most of the other numbers at all such as 10, 12, 15, etc” – told Samir. Appreciating the composition of these numbers, we named it composite numbers. And now, Samir is busy recognizing all the prime numbers between 1-100!
Who told that a seven year old neither can understand nor appreciate this classification of numbers!? By the way, we also discussed how 1 was an extremely unique number as the only way you can make a child stand in equal sized rows is just to make him stand! 1×1 🙂
tomeanmeans 