His teacher has been away, so they haven’t moved on to a new topic for the past couple of weeks. As such, Julian recently received his NAPLAN test results, so we spent our lesson working through a practice NAPLAN test. He initially did very well on the first couple of pages, getting the answers correct and being able to explain his thought process.

As we got further into the test, I started to leave him to work more independently, and perhaps because of that, he began to have more difficulties. Most noticeably, I picked up on weaknesses in percentages, expanding brackets, and linear equations.

She's currently on her school break, so we focused on exam preparation. I prepared a range of questions designed to challenge her, particularly ones where the topic or solution method wasn't immediately obvious. The goal was to build her ability to reason through unfamiliar problems and logically determine the best approach, rather than relying on pattern recognition alone.

We're definitely making progress. There were still moments, especially during the first half of the lesson, where she became overwhelmed and wasn't sure how to start. I reassured her that I'm completely okay with her getting questions wrong, as long as she can explain what she tried and why she chose that approach. By the second half of the lesson, I was happy with how she tackled the questions. She became more confident because she was able to justify her reasoning and often realised mistakes or correct approaches on her own.

We worked through part of the indices homework. He is confident with standard indices questions and has no major issues with them. I decided to change the pace by revising linear equations, graphing, and introducing more worded problems. He performed well and seemed to remember most of the concepts. I'll assign some homework on this to prepare him for extension topics.

He finds indices questions much more challenging when multiple rules need to be applied together. These combined-rule questions tend to stump him. I've assigned homework that gradually increases in difficulty so he can build confidence and transition into these more complex problems.

She thought she did terribly in her exam but ended up doing better than she expected. When looking through her exam, she correctly knew what to do for most of the questions.

The exam was more manageable than what she described, and also easier than what I expected. She could have done very well in this exam, but a lot of partial marks were lost and stacked up from rounding errors, small mistakes, or losing accuracy at the final step. It’s a shame because for a lot of the questions, she had the right idea and did most of the working really well. As mentioned, the exam was quite manageable, especially compared to the challenging topic tests she had encountered throughout the semester. We went through the questions she left unanswered or got wrong in our session. She had done many of these countless times in practice, but said she felt overwhelmed, especially with the time pressure in the exam. I could see some gaps in her confidence and understanding today because she seemed unsure with some of her answers. So, I focused a lot of the lesson on asking her to justify why she made each decision. This is a good habit for her, and should help with her uncertainty, freezing up, and getting overwhelmed, because she can try to reason through the question and find the best answer.