This evening I had the pleasure of watching Annabelle tutor Year 4 Maths!! Tonight, Olivia wanted to work through converting units of measurement. Annabelle immediately began printing worksheets for them to work on together, asking Olivia about how she’s approached the topic so far in class in order to gauge where exactly they should begin from.
Annabelle began by making sure that Olivia knew how to read scales correctly, using the increments shown in the images on the worksheets to guide Olivia into reading differently displayed mesurements of weight correctly. They moved slowly, and Annabelle did great to affirm Olivia as she moved through each example, especially when she answered correctly.
Following this, they began actually converting units of mass – without a calculator! Annabelle showed Olivia some really nice mental shortcuts to make the process a lot smoother and easier – when multiplying a whole number by a magnitude of 10, for example, simply adding the amount of zeros in the multiplier to the number being multiplied in order to get the final answer. Olivia caught on super quick!
They then moved on to multiplying decimals by large numbers, where Annabelle showed Olivia yet another really neat way to get to the answer – creating a rainbow for every zero in the multiplier and moving the decimal from its original place to the point where the final rainbow ends.
After converting larger units to smaller ones for a little while longer, Annabelle switched their focus to converting smaller units into bigger ones. This ensured that Olivia was comfortable converting units both ways and understood why we multiply when converting to a smaller unit, and divide when we’re converting to a bigger one.
I wanted to emphasise Annabelle’s encouraging tone and demeanour for the entirety of the session!! It was clear that it made Olivia feel really comfortable in attempting every question – even if it meant making a mistake, because she could feel that she was in the prescence of someone who cared more about her understanding the material than in getting every question right, every single time.
Thomas Koutavas