Students well prepared
Regardless of the outcome, one thing is certain – the principals and the teaching staff at the primary schools have done their best to ensure that the students were well prepared for the exam.
Speaking with The Barbados Advocate yesterday, Natalie Francis, the teacher of Class 4 Francis, said that they had lessons after school and during the Easter vacation where they focused on the essentials necessary to get through the exam.
They sent in 79 students altogether and she had 18 students in her class with 12 boys and six girls. Some of the areas that she personally covered were composition strategies, locating information, how to answer a composition, subject-verb agreement and how to begin a question; while in Maths, she focused on the areas that she noticed consistently gave the students issues such as fractions, percentages, charts and statistics.
“They would have also done a lot of past papers under exam conditions and then gone through these papers in detail, looking for areas where the students made mistakes and correcting these mistakes,” she said.
During the school term, the lessons were held on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3:15 p.m. to 5 p.m. while during the vacation, lessons were held three full days a week on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.
Francis said that the students showed consistent improvement as the time to the exam drew nearer and this is due to a combination of factors, from the efforts of the teachers to the hard work that the students themselves put in, to their parents working with them on their homework and doing any extra work. “They (parents) really went beyond the call of duty.”
She said that she spoke to the students before the day of the exam and she told them to go to bed early, have a good breakfast, be on time for the exam and once you get into the exam centre, read each question carefully before you answer it and make sure everything is good.
Deputy Principal of The People’s Cathedral (TPC) Primary School, Janice Lewis, said that the students went through a lot of past papers and they even had two exchanges with The St. Cyprian’s Boys’ School where the TPC students went to St. Cyprian’s and those students came to TPC. One of these was held at the end of April and the other at the beginning of May, where they wrote the past papers under exam conditions.
They also brought the students to The St. Michael School before the exam, so that they would become familiar with the environment.
Lewis said that they prayed with the students prior to them heading into the exam room and she encouraged the students to do their own praying before they started the exam.
She advised them to put God first and do their best and once they did these two things, they would be successful.
Dave Layne, Principal of St. Cyprian’s, said that all 31 of the young men that did the exam were well prepared, had a good attitude and were looking forward to doing the exam.
He said that the students usually do well in the 11-plus with approximately 90 per cent going to one of the older sec-ondary schools, usually Harrison College or Queen’s College.
He advised them to read through the material carefully, use their time wisely and remain focused. (PJT)