Final day of Primary School work experience

I have made it in one piece! I have completed my last day of work experience in the primary school. Today was my most challenging day I think. In the morning, I went to ask the lady (as I have done every morning) who first accepted me for work experience, what classes she wanted me to spend time with that day. She said she would leave it up to me, which was great although this meant that I had to awkwardly go and find some teachers that I had never met before to ask if I could observe some lessons. I could have chosen to stick with my favourite Year 3 class and looking back on it, I wish I had spent the day with them again because they are just so sweet and they really like me being there. I wanted to challenge myself though so I decided to find a Year 4 class to go to for the morning and a Year 6 class for the afternoon. I hunted down the Year 4 teacher who I had very briefly met previously because I was meant to be in her class last Friday but instead I opted to stay an extra day with the Year 3 class and so did not in the end go to her class. Today, she was not very amused when I asked if I could spend the day in her class because she said that she had already arranged stuff for me to do last Friday and I didn't turn up, but it wasn't my fault the kids in Year 3 really wanted me to stay an extra day and the general treatment of my work experience so far had been unstructured in that there have not been any tasks planned for me. I have always been able to go into any class I like as long as the teacher's haven't minded. I didn't know she had stuff planned for me; oh well, I apologised anyway and she seemed to cheer up. At that point though, I wanted to go back to the nice teacher of Year 3 and the kids that appreciated me but it would have looked rude to leave. This teacher luckily did cheer up when she saw that I got stuck in with helping. I went round each table of children while they were reading their books quietly. Something that I have surprised myself with is that I have never once been nervous when speaking to the kids and even to large groups of them at a time. The teacher (I hate saying 'the teacher' but it wouldn't be safe to use actual names I guess) said that whatever table I went to I could engage the children in any discussions that I liked while all the other tables had to remain silent. Naturally, none of the other tables did stay quiet and so there were lots of children being shouted at. I had some fun conversations with each table. This has been the only lesson where the teacher has allowed me to talk to the kids about general stuff, as normally I have to keep it strictly work related which I understand. I loved being able to ask them anything though. I learned that a lot of kids are very lucky and most of them have Nintendo Wii's I'm so jealous - I don't have one! Some kids talked to me about their parents being divorced and the new boyfriend/girlfriend of the parent which was really interesting to hear about and they were surprisingly mature and OK with it. I learned about all the different pets the children had. One girl told me she had a pet horse but it died in a cold winter :-( A couple of the kids lived on farms or had relatives with farms.

I watched the kids do some handwriting practice. I helped them to construct exciting sentences using made-up character's and bad weather conditions - one of their literacy lessons on nouns and time connectives i.e Today(time connective), Mr Smith was walking home from the shop in a good mood until a strong gust of wind swept him over backwards and he broke his leg. As with all the classes I have helped with, there was a wide range of ability levels. Only a very few of the children were able to write imaginative and well constructed sentences. The same ability differentiation happened in their Numeracy lesson. It was a lesson on how to tell the time. I was sat with a table of four boys who struggle the most with their work. I was given a plastic clock model with moving hands and I had to try and explain how to read the time. It seems like an easy thing to do, but not at all when they are all trying to shout over eachother and one boy even thought he could be the teacher and kept trying to tell me how I should be reading the clock and kept trying to snatch the clock and move the hands for me. To be honest it was quite funny because he had a big ego for someone so small, he kept patronising the other kids and telling me that he was very clever and that he knew more than everyone else. To be fair he was the best at the telling time compared to the other three boys who were not even listening very well because they were too busy mucking about, so in the end, my teacher voice came out and it worked. I managed to get them to listen and understand what quarter past, half past and quarter to meant. Then they had to write this all up in their books and they kept daydreaming or chatting and not copying down from the board the facts about time. They were writing really slowly and were waaaay behind the rest of the class. I don't think it's because they couldn't do the work but rather that they just wanted to mess about! One of the tasks was to think of actions you could do in 1 second i.e blink/clap/click your fingers and another was to think what could be done in 1 minute i.e play a game/tell a joke. The rest of the class found it easy but these guys were just not even trying. They were shouting ridiculous things out or if not they were repeating the same idea that I had already given them which was blink because they couldn't be bothered to think of their own. It was helpful to me to be faced with a particularly challenging group because it gives me the chance to work on my authority skills and regaining control of bad behaviour and also helping the kids in a positive way so that they feel more confident in their abilities. Generally I am very patient and I was with these kids, but I had to use my teacher voice because of the silly behaviour. Fair enough if they genuinely wanted help and were struggling because in that case I am more than willing to help and have a lot of patience. Assembly today was rather boring so I will leave out what happened...which was nothing much! I never did like assembly.

After lunch, I went to find a Year 6 teacher. Immediately I knew she wasn't one of the nicest teacher's I have met. I asked her if she would mind me observing her lesson for the afternoon and I asked if maybe I could help out. She replied by sarcastically saying 'well you certainly wont be observing I will be expecting you to help out and be very busy!' I'm sorry but that was a bit cheeky of her because I am volunteering my own free time to help and while my experience helps me get onto my course, I am still there to be helpful so it is quite rude to be so bossy. Obviously I hadn't meant that I wouldn't get stuck in and help, I was just being polite because some teacher's have preferred me to merely observe lessons rather than physically help out so I thought it best to ask her what she would mind me doing. She brought me into the classroom but didn't tell me where to sit and didn't introduce me to the class even though they were all looking at me because they wanted to know who I was. She seemed to just ignore me and get on with teaching but then finally she introduced me. The class was then split into groups of 3-4 children and told that they were going to have a special science afternoon. They were going to learn about Cantilevers - which I admit I couldn't for the life of me think what they were but the word sounded familiar. Turns out it's just a test to see how much weight a stick can take and how best to support the stick (ok so that's my simplified idea of it). I remembered doing it at school as soon as I saw the equipment. They were given 2 sheets of newspaper each and had to devise a way to make a pole out of it using only masking tape and scissors. They then had to tape one end of the pole to the table with 50cm of it sticking horizontally out in the air. I wandered round all the tables and gave a lot of them clues about the strongest method of making the pole - to roll the newspaper up tightly. Incidentally, something I forgot to mention. At the beginning of this lesson, the teacher had asked me to check through all the pages of the newspaper incase of any inappropriate pages like naked women. Why the teacher had bought a bunch of The Sun newspapers rather than a sensible one I don't know because every other page was a naked woman! Now as it happens, unfortunately I overlooked one such image of a woman in a skimpy bikini and very unfortunately it ended up on the table of the silliest boys table and they started giggling and showing the rest of the class. The teacher glared at me and snatched the paper off them. Woops! heehee.


Anyway, as I was saying. After wandering around all the tables I was asked to help with the boys table that found the work particularly difficult. Again, just as in the Year 4 class, these Year 6 boys were only not able to do the work I think because they were misbehaving, shouting and running around with scissors! One poor boy in the group I felt really sorry for because he was trying really hard but the others were spoiling it for him and I found myself feeling a little annoyed that the teacher had mixed a lovely, hard working boy in with a bunch of loud and boisterous kids. Well, there was only one thing for it...... yep, my teacher voice came out again and I shouted at them to stop being lazy and to get on with it. I explained that they were being very unfair on the boy who was actually working hard for the table. Happily, my shouting pretty much worked and I got them trying harder and concentrating more. Then after all the tables had made their newspaper sticks (cantilevers) they then had to test them for strength by placing metal weights in a plastic cup (with string attached like a little bucket) at different points along the stick to determine the weakest points of the stick. Most people's sticks collapsed and sagged downwards at the first test of weight. Later they learned about other ways to strengthen the stick like my adding string and supporting columns. I think the lack of convincing cantilevers was down to the general noise levels and lack of concentration in the class, because although their teacher shouts a lot, she didn't seem to have much control of the class. A lot of the 'sticks' weren't made very well with the odd exception of some very neatly crafted one's and I don't know if there was anything in it, but the neat and well structured ones came from the girl groups. It's funny because this Year 6 group behaved quite badly but all the younger classes behaved almost perfectly! Still, it was a good challenge for me and it was good to teach some of the older kids because although I found them more challenging than the younger classes, I still know that I want to teach older children at a secondary school. I'm sure the secondary pupils will mess around and be a challenge, but I like a challenge and I like having good conversations with them and teaching more complicated things.

My day was over and my last thing to do was say goodbye again to my lovely Year 3 class who I made a special visit to at the end of the day. I got lots of hugs and one girl said that when I became a teacher, I had to let her know at what school so that she could come and be in my class! How sweet! I gave a thank you card to the teacher of Year 3 who has always been very good to me and then when I had said my goodbyes I made one last visit to the lady who organised my work experience for me and gave her a card aswell. She also said she would be happy to give me a reference and she seemed a little disappointed that I wasn't doing more work experience. I felt really guilty knowing that I had decided on doing secondary teaching rather than primary but I still loved my time spent at the school and I will actually miss some of the children. It has been far more useful and fun than I had imagined it would be. I feel good that I have helped children and made them happy.