Learning Activities for 6O

Aside from following the Learning Intentions from the milepost meeting, Ms. Ting also had to prepare lessons and activities that are complementary to the students' needs. However, in general, having to learn a particular subject in isolation would not be interesting, in my most humble opinion, from this Ms. Ting would have to use various methods to capture the students' attention and interest. Thus, milepost meetings take significant roles in creating a lesson. The teacher's creativity as well, takes a greater step in boosting the class' contribution and effort. Practice does make perfect, however, overusing repetition will of course lose the students' attention.

The last IPC topic of Year 6 was building a village anglo saxon style. And of course, they now changed it to "Going with the Flow", a topic about rivers- it not only entails about geography such as the formation of rivers, it also gives the students an insight of history as well as some new addition of general knowledge. From the milepost meeting, an IPC topic takes around two weeks to finish for students with higher proficiency; if there are weaker and challenging students in the class, the duration will span up to a maximum of four weeks. The class who has finished achieving their Learning Intention will be given addtional work for revision in conjunction to waiting for other classes.

The way they taught Mathematics is different from most schools we have ever encountered. The students learn every single aspect of Primary Maths, however the flow of the lesson is more of a light and broader in terms on duration. Ms. Ting explained that so long as the students understand the concept, they will move to another one; they won't linger on a topic for too long. This type of learning activity, allows the students to constantly have a information renewal, they will have to reuse their long-term memory on what they have learnt to be able to answer the questions. Local national schools however has each topic to take around a month to finish or for the students to master them; Ms. Ting stated that this method of congesting a topic in a certain amount of time before moving on to another one as the cycle repeat is not beneficial to students especially when it comes to solving Math questions. There are possibilties where students may forget the topics if they do not revisit and revise them. Whereas, having a mixture of topics being revisited every now and then allows the students to think clearly and independently, as opposed to local national style learning activities, it does not cause the stduents' to think that a topic they are working on will be the same for a considerable amount of time, this can cause a student to slowly register their minds that they are learning the same concept everyday and it will be difficult for the students to think independently. Also, in most activities, Ms. Ting takes a more traditional approach when it comes to exercises - using textbooks, it is based on the school's request where there will be 3 volumes, supposedly each book becomes harder in difficulty.

6O revising their divisions. 

Ms. Ting also mentioned that there are three levels for the students in Maths: Alpha (beginner), Beta (intermediate) and Gamma (Advanced). From the start of the first class in term 1, the teachers will test their understanding to determine their proficiency level, hence determining the type of worksheet they will be working on. The reason of this type of classification is to allow the students to be equal, if the students are being labelled as "strong" or "weak", it will affect the students both intrinsically and extrinsically, especially on the "weaker" students, they would feel humilated and may lose interest in learning Maths. Of course, she encourages the students to challenge themselves to harder levels with the condition that they are able to understand and answer the worksheet or questions of their current level correctly. Consistent to her words, there was a child who had mild autism, despite getting distracted, he managed to get things done with a little push or reminder. The worksheets given to him were similar to any student. Occasionally, Ms Ting would approach the boy to check on his progress. Unfortunately, we did not encounter the usage of Maths worksheet so we were unable to see the papers in different levels.

Aside from worksheets, Ms. Tong would also play some music for the students to focus when they are working on their tasks regardless of subjects. Surprisingly, her activities as well as teaching methods were more towards visual and auditory. Most of the time, she is the one who is in charge of the whole class, gives them briefs and it was a reminiscent of a local national classroom.

We were given the honour to write
a couple of kennings for the students to guess
and for reference purposes.

6O's efforts in decorating their kenning. 

In English language class, Ms. Ting did not refer activities from textbooks. She acquires her activities and topics from online resources and it was very different from the activities we learnt in Primary. Their level of proficieny is generally higher when it comes to English, as they were learning about "The River" by Valerie Bloom which it was also related to their IPC theme which was a plus for them to be able to understand the relationship between subjects. Like I mentioned before, Ms. Ting applies a more traditional way of teaching in this aspect where she would handout worksheets for them to work on. Not only that, we noticed that she tends to introduce the unknown to the students such as a kenning, not even us has ever heard of this before. The students seemed very interested in learning as they enthusiastically wrote their very own kenning, well, that was, with our help as well. This type of activity where the students get a chance to customise and write their very own piece actually test the students' understanding in English, to be able to update their vocabulary and grammar, they also get a sense of accomplishment when they get to display their work in class. The fun part was they get to guess on each other's kenning - a kenning is a riddle -like poem that describes a chosen object, person, animal & etc. that consists of two or three words per sentence that ends with an action verb "er". 6O apparently managed to guess our kennings correctly. Even before Ms. Ting announced to them to guess. Another learning activity that fits to their IPC topic was a nature walk in a local nature reserve where they get to watch rivers. They were asked to write down what they had encountered there.