I really like how Olivia writes out each step. It helps break down difficult problems, makes it easier for her to catch mistakes, and helps her pick up follow-through marks. She’s always been quite good at using taught formulas and plugging values in. Recently, I’ve started seeing improvements in her ability to step back and understand the problem when the formulas aren’t so obvious. This shows a better understanding of topics and concepts, and an improved ability to translate trickier, less obvious questions into ones she’s seen many times in class.

She’s still prone to making small mistakes here and there. Moving forward, I should leave her to work more independently so she gets used to exam situations where she can’t ask for help or guidance. It’ll also help her practice double-checking her work.

She is much more comfortable with probability. In addition to our worksheets, I gave her the same questions she previously got stuck on in the test and she was able to work through them smoothly. If she ever feels stuck or overwhelmed, we have also discussed a clear strategy to fall back on which is to list the outcomes the question is asking for and draw a tree diagram if needed. We have now covered most of the probability questions she is likely to encounter so with this week’s homework and occasional revision tests we are ready to move on.

She is more confident with probability and is starting to skip steps which sometimes leads to small mistakes. It's just a matter of continued practice and becoming more familiar with different question types.

Julian has his preferred way of handling percentage questions. He definitely seems much more comfortable with this, and it’s acceptable, so I’m happy to leave it as is. He did quite well with financial maths, which he seems more enthusiastic about compared to other topics. I walked him through the two main interest formulas and worked through them together.

I’d like him to have his laptop and Maths Pathway set up before the next lesson. He made a couple of small, silly mistakes here and there, but other than that, it was pretty good overall.

The lesson went quite well. Olivia was able to accurately translate the questions into tree diagrams, which helped to simplify the problems. She found this method very helpful, and with more practice, I aim to turn probability into one of her strong suits.

She is still prone to making some of the same mistakes she made on her test. Given that we’ve just started this topic, she’s sometimes unsure what to do with the probability (i.e. whether to add or multiply them), but it’s not a big deal. With time and practice, I don’t see this being an issue. We will cover all types of questions, so she is well prepared for anything.