Dear Parents,
Please kindly
note the following:
The worksheets
for Decimals, Area of Triangles and Volume were returned to your child. Your
child can keep the file home for revision. Please also ensure that they bring
along their calculator and mathematical instrument set on 3 May 2017 as they
will need them during the examination.
Decimals
1) They must be able to
multiply (moving decimal point to the right) and divide (moving decimal point
to the left) by tens, hundreds or thousands without the use of the calculator.
2) For conversion of
measures, they must be able to express an equivalent measure given a measure to
convert. They, always in their haste to solve the questions, convert 1 m into
1000 cm which is wrong. They also need to be alert so that there will not be
any wrong use of equal sign ( Writing 1 = 100 when what they really mean
is 1 m = 100 cm).
3)
Wrong use of equal signs is also common when there is a non-terminating
decimal.
For
example: 95 divided by 7 = 13.57142857 (They must copy all the digits shown on
the calculator) OR
95
divided by 7 = 13.571 … ( … means the digits go on) OR
95
divided by 7 approximate to 13.571
So
if they write 95 divided by 7 = 13.571, half a mark will be deducted due to wrong
use of equal sign as 13.571 x 7 = 94.997, not 95.
4)
For questions involving in conversion, they have to be alert as what are the
units used as grams may be used in the question but they are supposed to write
their final answer in kg.
As some of the questions
allowed the use of calculator and if the question is about money, 1 mark will
be deducted for those who wrote their final answer only to 1 decimal place
(This is because when they use the calculator, the calculator only displays the
final answer without the zero in the hundredth place).
Area
of Triangle
1)
There are four basic facts about triangle which you can refer to your child’s
notes. The most important fact is “The height for the triangle must be
perpendicular to the related base.” Thus for this topic, it is important for
them to identify the correct base and height.
2)
They need to know the formulae to find the area of triangle. Some of the pupils
are using the method of finding the area of the related rectangle and then
dividing the area of the related rectangle by 2. I am fine with this method but
there were numerous occasions that they had forgotten to divide by 2. Thus it
is better if they used “half x base x height” instead.
3)
They need to remember the units when writing their final answer.
Volume
2) I have already proven to
them that 1 cubic metres is not equal to 1 litre.
3) If they are counting the
number of unit cubes, the diagram must show that the cubes are against the wall
so that there are no hidden cubes behind.
SA1
Practice Paper
1) Paper 1:
Qn 10: They need to know that to have the same area, the numerical value of
the base and height must be the same.
Qn 15: They
need to know that there are 4 digits in 1 group and the sum of the digits in
one group is 10. When 87 is divided by 4, the remainder of 3 means that there
are digits 1, 2 and 3 not in a group and not that the sum of the digits is 3.
2) Paper 2 (Use
of Calculator is allowed):
Qn 2: They need
to learn to be accurate in their drawing.
Qn 7: When
asked to state the height in centimetres, some kids went to name the height
instead. They need to be more careful in the reading of the question.
Qn 9: They are
still not comfortable working with fractions as numbers thus facing difficulties
in finding the area when the length is given as a fraction.
Qn 12: In their
haste to finish their papers, they used the letter M to represent Male and Men
and thus were confused when the question asked for the total number of men and
women.
Qn 16: As the
amount of money received by C can be easily found, they should do that step so
that they could know how much money A, B and D received. Many of them
mistakenly represented C as 1 unit thus gave the total number of units as 10.
Qn 17: Many of
them misunderstood that A had three units at first thus dividing 560 by
4.
That’s all for
now…
