Math Relearning/EngageNY/GK
These are my comments on EngageNY's Kindergarten Module 1.
Overview
I expect Kindergarten to be largely the same as pre-K, just moving a bit faster. This is because New York's pre-K standards are practically the same as the K standards.
At this point I'd like to note that the lesson objectives of this curriculum basically form a second set of standards. I might be even more interested in these than in the Common Core standards because, since they're meant for actual teaching, they're more granular, and they're specifically ordered to unfold the concepts logically.
But the lesson objectives aren't enough by themselves to give me the sense that I'm grasping everything. I want something I can read that will make me feel like every statement flows logically into the next. For that I need concepts and not just lists of tasks.
When I think about formalizing math concepts, these concept types seem important: objects, properties (of objects), relationships (among objects; relationships include things like equations), tasks (specific results to achieve using relationships), algorithms (procedures for carrying out tasks), capabilities (types of situations that particular relationships and tasks can address), applications (specific real-world situations to be solved with math). These form components of a system for doing math.
I think I'm enough of a visual learner that diagrams really would help me grasp this stuff. Right now the curriculum material feels like a wall of text. I'm thinking of extracting the relevant graphics from the lesson files and putting them in a new document listing the concepts.
I also think it would help me remember the concepts and piece them together if I had a name for each one. That would take a lot of work on top of all the work of discerning and spelling out the concepts, but it might be worthwhile.
Taking notes that simply copy from the source material feels like a waste of time, but it's helpful to have a streamlined set of information to examine and review, so maybe it is worth the time.
New propositional concepts from this module:
- A collection of objects can have attributes that allow it to be grouped with other collections, such as the quantity of objects they contain.