T1 W4-6 5N1

I have been teaching them Probability and Matrices for the past three weeks. The students were able to do fairly well on the Test on Probability. The motivation for them to do well is 'not to be in SRP', which is a good motivation if you ask me. When I was about to go to the next topic, I wrote some questions on the whiteboard and gave the students 10 minutes to read their textbook to get the answers. At the end of ten minutes, students were able to give the answers and I think I would do this for the rest of the topics we are going to cover. When students were given time to find the answers to the questions (teachers need to pick out the key things about the chapter), they would be more involved in their own learning. The start of the chapter was smooth sailing. Addition, subtraction and scalar multiplication of matrices is very straight forward and the students were good at it, except for some who were careless. The hard part of this chapter are the interpretation and the multiplication of matrices. Students needed to be guided slowly how to interpret the results and also not to be careless in their multiplication. More practice will be done in week 7 expecially on interpretation nd matrix multiplication.

T1 W4-6 4E1

For the past three weeks, I have taught the students about Probability. On the whole students were able to recap what they have learnt in chronological order, i.e. Simple Probability, Possibility Diagram, Mutually Exclusive events, Tree Diagrams, Independent and Dependent events. As the group is small I was able to teach the students better as some were slower than the rest. As the other students were doing their sums in their lesson package, I was able to sit with the slower ones and help them tackle some problems. Some of them fedback that I was too slow for them but I kept to the same pace as there were others who were not as fast as them. Had I gone faster this small group would be lost.
When I was away for two days for a course, I gave them extra work on Probability and informed them of the test that they were to sit for when I returned. They were very focused and worked hard on the paper even though some were not certain of the correctness of their answers. What I can say is that this group has a good attitude towards Maths and are able to perform if they are given more encouragement and more questions to stretch them further.
After giving a test on this topic I realise that four students were still not sure of this topic. Since two of them will not be in the SRP due to their curriculum in the afternoon, I woould see them on other days for a small group coaching. I would continue to motivate this group to work hard so that they are able to catch up with the rest.

T1 W4-6 - 2N3

For the past 3 weeks I have been teaching them Chapter 2 Proportion. I thought it was going to be fast. But it turned out to be too abstract for students to answer questions on maps and scales. It was difficult for some students to do conversion between km and cm and square km and square cm. A lot of pratice was given and students needed to be handheld each step. After giving two quizes on conversion and seeing students' improvement, I was confident that they were able to proceed to the next part which is direct and indirect propotion. When I was away for two days I had prepared two worksheets for them to do on this new topic. I realised that that does not work with the 2N3. They were not able to read examples on their own to be able to replicate the steps and solve the questions. They really need to be told what steps to take and they need a lot of pratice for each kind of question. Next time I would just prepare revision worksheets on last year's topics. At least they would not say that they have not been taught. I have decided to give them one question for homework (to be done in their notebook) on previous topics so that they will not forget what they have learnt so far and more questions on the current topic so that they have more practice.
So far I realised that Wen Fang, Wei Xiong, Bendy and Kai Leng are very hardworking and will do their best to get the answers to the questions set for them. There are some whom I have to work on and get their attention. Two new students joined last week and 1 who had just came back and I will gauge their abilities this coming week.

T1 W4-6 - 1E2

My 1E2 has been a very interesting class to teach so far. I have discovered that they are very competitive (and supportive of each other), very enthusiastic in showing their workings on the whiteboard and students being students, love having games. We have been learning about Real Numbers (chapter 2) for the past 3 weeks. I didn't want to rush teaching this topic as I didn't want them to learn wrongly (due to misconceptions not being uncovered at the earliest stage of learning) which could lead to mistakes being repeated over and over again at the higher levels. In order to make the learning of addition and subtraction of positive and negative integers we played a simple game which made the whole class alert. It's a very simple game that goes something like this. 'I am -16 . What is 5 subtracted from me?" And the person with the answer on their pieces of paper will stand up and read the next part of the clue. I had made sure that everyone is involved in this game as 41 clues were given out. The game turned out well and was enjoyed by everyone and most importantly, they learn better as I would write out the clue on the board as it was being read out by students(visual learning). Also these days (I think its because of the AFL sessions that we are having), I am more patient in waiting for students' answers after I have given them a question. I realised that nowadays I keep asking students to raise their hands in order to have a quick check on their learning. I also marked more consciously nowadays, and wrote down the names of students who have trouble in key questions and called them out when I gave their assignments back after marking.

This is my first Sec 1E class after many years of teaching upper sec students. I am very strict with them and I am glad that they are trying very hard to meet up with my expectations. I think after this topic I will teach them how to play NUMERO. This game helps in making students form an equation with the four operations and also squares, square roots and cube and cube roots.