Tutoring Zein – #1

This Sunday I went to my cousins house to tutor him between 10 and 11 am. This was something we have been planning for the last couple weeks and after the curfew was finally taken off I took my opportunity. My cousin is in the 6th grade and had just joined the Middle Years Program (MYP) in my school. Whereas I had just graduated out of the Middle Years Programme and was starting the Diploma Programme (DP).  This gives me proficient knowledge about the classes he is taking and how I could improve his efficiency when studying for these subjects. We decided to primarily focus on Mathematics because that was the one subject he had a slight bit of trouble in. This was also coincidently a really good thing for the both of us as we both shared the same Math teacher and had access to similar resources so I knew what type of work he would be doing. He is currently learning about dividing and multiplying fractions so we began the lesson with that. He had previously just finished PEMDAS so I decided to incorporate that too just to refresh his memory and make sure he fully understood it.

In this photo he is answering some of the hand written questions I assigned to him. In our first lesson he got 10/10 on all his questions. A strong start for something he was apparently struggling in.

We started the lesson by looking at some of the current work he had been given on MyiMaths and tried to work around that. I made sure that she showed his process and explained to me whenever he answered a question. When he did not understand it we went through it step by step until he fully grasped the concept. This lesson I engineered in order to help him revise his past knowledge and be fully confident in dividing fractions. In this previous test he has taken his only struggle came in questions where he had to divide fractions. After a MyiMaths exercise and a few questions of my own he is now fully capable of doing it by himself. For next class I want to revise his knowledge on what I taught him last class with a pop quiz and I hope to do this every 2-3 classes. Also after talking to his mother we thought that it would be best for me to bring a calculator if I need to double check his answers quickly but not for him to use. Because he does not use a calculator he does mental math very fast despite his age and I think that by not buying a calculator he can use that in his advantage as the difficulty of his problems do not require a calculator. I am very excited for this learning process and will do everything I can to improve Zein’s math skills aid him through his MYP journey.