cognitive acceleration
DEVELOPING CHILDREN'S THINKING
Concrete preparation
The problem to be solved is always put into a familiar context so that the difficulty is not one of unfamiliarity, but of conceptual demand. This is sometimes called the 'hook' of the lesson, and often takes the form of a story that is personal to the class or the classteacher. It is the 'hook' that engages the pupils and gives their learning a meaningful context. For example:
'One night last week, I came home and found that I had been burgled! I was really upset and called the police straight away. But when they came they looked all over the house and found no fingerprints or clues at all. In the end, all they found was this hat and this single glove in my back garden. Do you think they could use this evidence to get any information about who burgled my house?' (PCAME, Lesson 18, Who Dunnit?) This leads to a mathematical investigation that compares head circumference to hand span.
'My daughter really likes to collect interesting stones, and when we go out on trips, she always brings some home. Her room is getting really messy with all these stones so I said to her, "Could you sort them out into some sort of order, so that the room looks tidy?" But she really couldn't work out how to do it. Do you think you can work out a way of putting these stones in order?' (Let's Think , Activity 10, Stones) This leads to a group activity where pupils look at a variety of ways of sorting 3D objects into size order by their different dimensions.
