Today I had the pleasure of observing Demetria with her Year 3 student, Aaria. In the session they focused on English, Religion and Math; specifically, writing a story about Ruby Red, studying for Aaria’s weekly religion quizzes and fractions.
Demetria began the session with English by marking Aaria’s homework where she had written a story about Ruby Red. She focused on the importance of imagery by prompting Aaria with questions such as, “can you imagine where Ruby Red?”, “Can you imagine where she likes to play?”. These questions were significant as they allowed Aaria to understand why she needed to include more descriptions, rather than the fact that she just simply did. This provides a great framework for Aaria’s learning in the future.
Moving onto religion, Demetria had prepared a trivia styled activity with Aaria where she asked her questions and got her to write her answers down in different colours. This was interesting as she capitalised on using different colours to foster memory and the absorption of information. This seemed to work very well as when Demetria repeated the quiz in a different order, Aaaria only got 1 question incorrect.
Finally, Demetria covered fractions with Aaria, a topic which she seemed extremely confident in. It is evident that Demetria has covered this topic with Aaria very well as she was very advanced for her age and understood everything from lessons covered in the past. For this topic, Demetria opted to using the whiteboard which contributed to the lesson moving smoothly. As Demetria went through questions on the board, Aaria was eventually able to work independently and finished all worksheets provided quickly.
Overall, these were the following methods that I found the most helpful to use in my own lessons:
1. Encompassing multimodal teaching, in particular, using the white boards, note books and the laptop.
2. Utilising different colours to aid in memorisation techniques.
3. Allowing for conversation in between questions yet asking if she had finished her questions to ease her back into completing her work.
All in all, Demetria clearly has an amazing relationship with Aaria which was very admirable. Her close dynamic with her has allowed for an environment of comfortability in which Aaria is not intimidated to ask questions or express difficulties.
Briana Vaz
