5.4 An analysis of the lesson observations
5.4.3 Teaching and learning resources
Teaching and learning materials are the essential instruments that teachers may use for effective teaching and for learners not to forget what they have learnt. Generally, in all of the schools observed, the classroom walls displayed mathematics and English information. The classrooms had colourful charts hanging on the walls, but none of the teachers used or referred to those charts when teaching. Most of the participants used worksheets, coloured chalk and workbooks when teaching data handling. Different data handling topics were observed, and those topics are listed in Table 13.
100
Table 13: Data handling topics observed on different days at each participating school
School Topic, day 1 Topic, day 2
Green Primary The weather calendar and graphs
Days of the calendar
Blackberry Primary Arbour day (planting of trees) Graphs
Yellow Primary Graphs Graphs
Reddy Primary Different types of graphs Sorting and summarising data
Blueberry Primary Graphs Days of the calendar
Pink Primary Collecting and summarising Data
Graphs
Purple Primary Collecting and sorting data Graphs
During the first observation at Green Primary the teacher asked the learners about months of the year and asked them to recite these. Learners were asked to identify the signs of the weather, for example the sun, wind, rain and the clouds. The teacher drew a pictograph on the chalkboard with the signs of the weather. The learners were able to read and interpret the graph, but sometimes the challenge was in understanding the instruction or question. For example, the question was: How much more are the days of the wind to that of the clouds? There were 7 windy days on the graph and 3 cloudy days. The learners were supposed to subtract 3 from 7 and get the answer, which is 4 (7-3=4). Regarding that question, the learners did not give an answer; instead they were all quiet. The reason for not giving an answer was not that the learners were unable to calculate, but they had a problem understanding the question. When the teacher asked learners to give the answer of seven minus three (7-3), they were able to give the correct answer.
The challenge of learners not understanding the questions was also identified at Blackberry Primary. The teacher drew a pictograph with trees since she was teaching about Arbour Day. On the X axis the teacher wrote the names of the schools and on the Y axis she drew the trees. For example, Qinisile’s question was: “In these 18 trees bring back Xolophambili’s trees”, meaning that learners should add the number of Xolophambili’s trees to 18. In the previous instruction she said they should take away Xolophambili’s trees, implying that they had to subtract the number of those trees. The problem then was bringing the trees back. Even when the teacher continued and asked how many schools had more trees, again the learners could not give the correct answer. Qinisile’s response was: “You don’t understand the question … How many?” Therefore
101
the researcher concluded that learners had a problem of understanding the instructions although they were in their vernacular language. Moreover, it might happen that the learners had a challenge with the word sums, because when the teacher used words like “add” or “subtract” the learners could understand what they were supposed to do.
Although the learners found the pictograph easy to understand, they had a problem reading or interpreting the bar graph. In Yellow Primary School Honey was teaching measurement. She drew the bar graph on the chalkboard, the X axis being the days of the week and the Y axis showing the litres of milk delivered. The teacher, for example, asked the learners how many litres of milk were delivered on Wednesday, and a learner said 15 instead of 44. Honey’s response was: “No … the government will say go and count people and you will come back with wrong statistics because of your carelessness.”
The same challenge of learners having a problem understanding the bar graph was also observed at Blueberry Primary. Charity was also teaching measurements in her classroom. Charity gave learners the exercise about babies’ weights, and hung the chart with the bar graph on the chalkboard. On the X axis the names of the babies were written, and on the Y axis the mass in kilograms (kg). When the teacher asked the learners the weight of the first baby, learners gave the wrong answers. The teacher assisted them by pointing at the chart, showing learners the weight of the first baby. Then they were able to give the correct answer.
At Reddy Primary Betty taught learners different types of graphs, and she had drawn those graphs on the chart (the back of the calendar). The graphs that Betty showed learners were the pictograph, line graph and bar graph. When she gave learners an exercise, Betty asked learners to draw a bar graph. That was difficult for the learners to draw and align what was on the X axis with what was on the Y axis. The class exercise was in the learners’ workbooks, and none of the learners presented the data correctly on the bar graph. As a result most of the learners struggled until the end of the mathematics period.
At Pink Primary Jabu’s learners also could not draw the bar graph on the chalkboard. Jabu wrote the table on the chalkboard with learners’ ages from 8 to 11 years. Jabu then asked learners to lift up their hands as she called their age. The challenge was when she asked learners to draw the graph on the chalkboard using data that were in the table. Jabu then assisted learners by drawing the bars herself. Therefore for foundation phase learners the bar graph is a challenge, and teachers need to devise some strategies to alleviate this problem.
What the researcher found remarkable was that when the same topic (graphs) was taught in Purple Primary School, learners did not have any difficulty in understanding and reading the bar graph. The learners were given an exercise based on the pictograph, bar graph and pie chart (graph). The learners at Purple Primary were using their workbooks designed by the school.
Every time Fiona gave learners some work to do, she would ask learners to read an instruction.
She always said “What is your instruction? Read.” This helped the learners to think of what was
102
expected before writing or answering the questions, and this might be the reason for the learners in this school not struggling with understanding the graphs, especially the bar graph.
Since the observations were done in the same school term (third term), most of the topics which were taught in the different schools were the same. More details about the topics taught by teachers will be discussed in the next chapter (Chapter Six).