Today I observed Sophie’s lesson with her Year 9 Maths student. Firstly they were working on working with square numbers and rules with positive and negative numbers. Then they started to focus on the topic that her student is doing in school, which is significant figures and rounding. Sophie started to go through some of the previous exercises that her student had done at school to see how she was finding those sub-topics which is also a great form of revision.

I liked how Sophie would not immediately tell her student if she was making a mistake and instead tried to lead her to the right answer, especially with her student’s weaker areas like negative numbers.

Sophie also made sure to tell her student other methods of working out particular questions which is a great things as different people prefer using different ways of figuring out a question. I also liked how Sophie encouraged her student to write down her working out if she’s stuck instead of trying to do it in her head.

I also liked that after figuring out what kinds of questions her student was slightly weaker at during the revision papers, Sophie made sure to select new questions that matched those weaker areas. This is good as it allows the student to perfect those areas so that she is strong overall in the topic. I thought it was great that Sophie encouraged her student to try and do some of the addition and multiplication questions in her head before saying that she could use her calculator.

This was a great lesson to observe. Well done Sophie!

Sophia McLean