I think that after going through the different phases of mitosis Siena has a pretty good understanding about the key things that occur in each stage. Similarly with the phases of interphase, she could recall what occurs at each phase after we went through it a few times which was good to see. Hopefully she keeps revising this and will still remember during our next lesson + her SAC next week.

Although Siena has developed a general understanding of many of these processes, she did not seem to recall many of the concepts she had covered in class before I explained them to her. This suggests that she might need to do some more revision after her classes, or use more active recall techniques to move what she has learnt from her short term to long term memory. As there is a lot to cover before the SAC which Siena is still very unsure about, I do not think we will be able to spend the time to go really in depth to many topics. Hopefully she will at least have a basic understanding of most of the concepts so that nothing in the SAC is totally unfamiliar to her. In the future, Siena needs more consistent revision of topics to prevent the need to cram new concepts before the SAC and instead move towards applying learnt concepts as revision closer to an assessment.

Moving on to a new topic, we went through the stages of photosynthesis, looking at the inputs and outputs of each stage and where they are used/released as waste. I think that after the lesson Lily understood the light dependent reaction quite well and was able to explain where the O2, H+ ions and electrons end up after being split from water. She was also able to relate her knowledge of factors affecting the rate of enzymic activity to how similar factors would affect the rate of photosynthesis which was great.

Although Lily did seem to pick up what I was explaining to her about the light independent stage of photosynthesis, there was a lot of information we were running through and I am not sure how much of it she has actually grasped. Particularly with the role of RuBisCO in fixing CO2 into two 3 carbon molecules. To distinguish between C3, C4 and CAM plants, Lily needs to have a solid understanding of the role of RuBisCO and how these plants aim to prevent photorespiration through RuBisCO's activity in the presence of O2. I think she did manage to pick up the general differences between the three, but will have to see next lesson how much she has retained/how in depth her understanding is.

Since Lily's school hasn't moved on from redox reactions which Lily is quite comfortable with, we went through some practice questions from past VCAA exam papers related to the fuels topic Lily just had her last SAC on + some organic chemistry questions that I thought were relevant. Overall, her knowledge of different fuels was relatively good, and she is now very comfortable with thermochemical equations and energy profile diagrams which was really great to see. Her understanding of polar and non-polar regions of molecules also seems to be improving which is something we've been working on for the past few lessons.

Although Lily has begun to have a good grasp on the properties of organic molecules and how their polarity may affect intermolecular bonding, she now needs to begin applying these to practice questions that indirectly ask for this. For example by explaining why certain molecules are water or lipid-soluble, or why a certain triacylglycerol will have a higher melting point compared to another with more double bonds in its fatty acid tails.

N/A as the lesson was cancelled without 24 hours notice

N/A as lesson was cancelled without 24 hours notice