Today Kara brought a little homework to our session - a take home investigation on Pythagoras' Theorem. This investigation included multiple segments: explaining Pythagoras' Theorem (PT), proving PT, and calculating PT. Kara was somewhat uncertain on how to prove/explain Pythagoras' Theorem in her investigation but got the basics written on paper. Her diagrams were insightful, well drawn, and explained the concept thoroughly. This investigation took up most of the session.

Being able to articulate and explain a mathematical concept in words is a valuable skill to have. It seems that, while Kara can explain her thought process reasonably well, she must get into the habit of using mathematical terms when describing her calculation process. Despite this, her solutions for proving Pythagoras' Theorem are very creative and understandable!

Today Kara did very well on her 5-minute times tables especially after including the 14s. Since she had just recently finished her previous unit and was currently starting a new one in class, we decided to do a little algebra revision. Since I had noticed before that Kara was having some trouble with opening up brackets (especially those with negatives involved), I decided to challenge her and allow her to practice with questions all involving brackets while also working up to a harder difficulty.

This session I truly believe that Kara has grasped expanding simple brackets, however, I plan to further challenge her with multiple parentheses within brackets in a later session. This session has also showed that, with a little practice, Kara is definitely able to easily overcome her shortcomings in math and just needs more exposure to different types of questions to broaden her skills.

Lorna recently was allowed to take her test home - on which, she got 74%! During our session, we went over the questions that she lost marks on and I asked her to give them another attempt. Lorna was able to correctly answer the majority of them and understand her mistakes on all of them, showing that she indeed has the skills and knowledge to consistently achieve these marks! For the second half of our session, we revised on triangles as well as differentiating earlier definitions including: angles/right angles, perpendicular/parallel/point, ray/segment/line. Afterwards, we also started introductions into quadrilateral shapes and tried to find the missing angles.

Lorna's achievement on this test should be celebrated! Being able to finally showcase her capabilities and effort is a truely noteworthy accomplishment. This shows that, even though she learns a bit differently in some topics, Lorna is definitely able to produce these kinds of results. There is always room for improvement, however, and in Lorna's case, it may be that we will be focusing on showing her working when finding missing angles in shapes next session.

A new topic was introduced in Lorna's class, as she informed me today. For this session, we started off with some definitions of terms that were going to be used in this topic. The quiz involved differentiating similar vocabulary such as the differences between angles/right angles, perpendicular/parallel, and segment/lines. Lorna followed some exercises in her textbook that helped further implement the definitions in her mind. Afterwards, we covered the different types of angles as well as discerning obtuse from reflex angles. Lastly, we finished off with some multiplication practice with pre-prepared questions.

Lorna did extraordinarily well with her multiplication practice especially due to the fact that I had prepared these questions with multiple of the same digits - which seemed to have stumped her before. She also remembered how to multiply numbers with decimal places and even achieved the correct answers for multiple 3-digit multiplication questions! Hopefully the introduction to drawing angles with a compass today will help her understand how to draw more complicated angles in her future classes on this topic.