LESSON PLAN

Subject

Mathematics

Class:

1SD4

Unit

Arithmetic

Date:

7 March 2016

Topic

Approximation and Estimation

Time:

0745 0845

Prior Knowledge
Students should already know:
1. how to round off numbers to a required number of decimal places
Instructional Objectives
By the end of the lesson, students should be able to:
1. round off numbers to a certain number of significant figures
Tim
e

Lesson Development

Rationale (optional)

Resources

Introduction OR Pre-activity
5
mins

Settling down of class

5
mins

Recap of previous lesson

Teacher to ask some students how to round off some numbers to some
number of decimal places.

Activating Prior Knowledge

PowerPoint Slides

Lesson Development OR Main Activities

5
mins

Motivation to using significant numbers

Teacher to provide examples to the use of significant numbers in everyday
life:
1) Capacity of football stadium
- We do not usually read of the exact capacity of a stadium in the
newspapers it is usually a rounded off value
- Question is, who decides what value to round off or which value is
important enough to keep

PowerPoint Slides and

worksheet

2) Price of a new handphone

- How much would you say if you would want to convince your parents to
buy?
- Which value is important enough?
Idea is that we are already doing approximation in our everyday life as it is
helpful for us to get a rough idea of how big/small or how cheap/expensive
things are.
15
mins

Introducing significant figures (s.f.)

Teacher to introduce the idea of significant figures in approximation and
introduce the three rules to determine which figures are considered as
significant in a given number
1) Non-zero digits
2) Zeros between 2 non-zero digits
3) Zeros before the 1st s.f. are not considered significant
Teacher to provide examples and to ask students for answers to some
questions after providing each rule.
Steps to rounding off to a required significant figures
Teacher to introduce the various steps required to round off a number to a
required number of significant figures.
Teacher to remind students that there is a parallel to the steps to take with
that undertaken while rounding off numbers to a required number of
decimal places.
Examples will be given after each step for the steps to be clearer for easy
comprehension.

15
mins

Doing of Worksheet
Students are given time to try out the following questions:
1) Example 1
2) Example 2
3) Try It! Question 1
4) Try It! Question 2

10
mins

Teacher to walk around to observe the common mistakes that students

make and to go through the answers after most of the students are done
with the questions.
Closure and Consolidation OR Post-Activity

5
mins

Teacher to reiterate the steps required to round off significant figures and to
give out the assignment questions, which are required to be submitted at
the next lesson.

Reflections (Choose 1 aspect of the lesson to reflect on positive or negative one. It can be written in point form not more than 1 page)
1. What happened? (What did my students do? What did I do?)
2. Why? (Why did I think things happened this way? Why did I choose to act the way I did?)
3. So what? (What have I learnt from this?)
4. Now what? (What do I want to remember to think about in a similar situation? How do I want to act in future?)

NOTE: General guidelines for a double-period lesson about 5 pages, excluding references and
worksheets/resources (Times New Roman, font size 12)
2015, NIE, Office of Teacher Education (OTE), Practicum