T1 W7-8 2N3

I have finally finished teaching 2N3 the topic on Proportion. Having the AFL workshop really helped me in teaching this class. Because of the sessions, I had changed the way I wanted to teach the class. As I had said before, the students were not able to do the worksheets as the examples that I thought would help them, proved useless. I went on to 'force' the steps on them and the first two lessons turned out disastrous and of course the students and I ended up feeling very frustrated, especially the more-abled students. They just can't figure out why they can't do the sums. It was my mistake. I didn't plan enough for them. They were lacking in their pre-requisite knowledge for that topic. The prior knowledge that they needed were: the ability to find the squares, square roots, cube and cube roots of integers, the ability to solve simple linear equations and also the technique of cross-multiplying. So when the facilitators of the AFL workshop said that it's ok to spend more time in discovering and clarifying their misconceptions and making sure the students have the correct building blocks before proceeding to the next level, I did just that. I spent two periods on making sure they have the required pre-requisite knowledge. Then I repeated the steps that I did with them and it was so much easier for the students and I. For every step that they did correctly, I praised them. It is important to celebrate the small successes as I can see that that keeps the class motivated. The students were now able to apply the skills and were very motivated to do another sum when they get the first one correct. About one-third of the class kept wanting to show their correct workings on the board and most of them passed in the test given. I really felt satisfied. The next topic that they will be doing will be Expansion and Factorisation of Algebraic Fractions. I will spend a few periods testing their prior knowledge (simple algebraic expansion and manipulations) before teaching them how to expand the product of two algebraic expressions a.k.a the 'smiley face' .