Primary School work experience

Yesterday - 3rd March 2008

Yesterday I had my first day of work experience at a local primary school. The teacher who first decided to allow me to visit her school for a week has been fantastic. When I arrived yesterday morning, she let me get stuck right in and while she took the register, one child at a time would bring me a short book to read to me and then when they had finished, I would write a comment in their progress book. The age of this class was around 4-5 years. What surprised me most is that not one of the children was worried about having a stranger in their classroom and all of them seemed to really enjoy talking to me. The teacher and I then played word games with the children in a lesson about phonics. The game involved understanding the way adding the letter 'e' on to the end of a word changed the sound and meaning of a word. For example: TAP and TAPE. Once all the children understood the idea then they were all given one word each on a piece of paper and had to find who had the word that connected to their own, so one person would have TAP and one would have TAPE so they had to sit next to eachother. Then after the game was finished I moved on to another class called the Foundation Group. From what I gather these are the youngest children and their is no real structure to their activities. There seem to be several tables with creative materials on them and also a play area with a sandpit and dolls house etc. The teacher in the Foundation Group wanders around and helps children with any activity that they feel like doing and so this is what I also did. I was not watched by any other teachers so I felt like I was in charge and this was a helpful experience; to totally have a taste of teaching by myself and controlling the class. I helped children trace around the template of a number between 0 and 9 and then I watched and demonstrated how to decorate the numbers for a wall display. At this point I had such a funny comment from one of the children. She asked me if I had children and when I said no, she asked why not and why was I in a school if I didn't have any children, so I explained I was there to learn how to be a good teacher. Then, she poked my belly and said ''Is there any babies in there?'' I thought it was so funny, she looked so confused, but I also thought oh my god I need to lose some weight!!

In the afternoon, I sat quietly in a corner of a numeracy lesson with children aged 6-7 and observed a PGCE student teach the children. She was herself being observed by a lady who was perhaps her mentor I'm not quite sure. This particular PGCE student in my opinion is already the perfect teacher. She has her own children and seems already very experienced and has worked previously as a teaching assistant. She is very confident and has a wonderful command over the children, mixing humour with firmness so that the children really pay attention to what she is doing and if they don't, she soon has them behaving properly. I will certainly steal some of her classroom control techniques. One of her techniques is that she explains to the class that she is not going to speak to them until everyone is quiet and sitting nicely. Also, when children start fidgeting and messing about she adds humour by saying ''stop rocking about you are making me sea sick.'' This lesson was very basic and all about representing groups of data in tables, such as how many children were aged 6 in the class and were boys. I got a chance to ask this PGCE student and one other about their course and if they are enjoying it. They both told me it's hard work and lots of essays, but really interesing and rewarding. They both seemed to agree that the PGCE route may be better than the GTP route (where you earn your qualification while being in full-time employment as a teacher) because the GTP route is not as easy as you don't have so many other students also doing the same course as you to talk to and share ideas with. It has put me off the GTP route a bit, which I was considering as a way of still getting onto a course for this september (I have missed the deadline for PGCE this september now because as I thought, I needed more work experience; the GTP deadline isn't for a while yet though so I have enough time to get the experience).

The next lesson, with again, a different teacher, was with younger children again and involved watching a projection screen of a video about what different materials houses are made of: brick, wood, glass, clay, plastic etc. The classroom facilities have definitely changed since my days at school which made me feel really old! They now have special white boards where a computer program is projected onto the board and then the whole board becomes touch sensitive so the kids can press buttons just by touching the projection of them on the board. After the video and touch screen session, I spent the rest of the day playing estate agents and also drawing houses with the children. Again, I was amazed how happy the children were to play with me and how comfortable they were around me. They all wanted to sit with me and learn and some wanted to sit on my knee or hold my hand. Some even wanted to sing songs with me and dance. The difference in this school is that to me it has an unusual structure. All classrooms are open plan. There are no doors and all classes can hear and see every other class - which I'm not sure is a good idea because the children sometimes get distracted by the other noises around them. At different times in the day the children are also allowed to do whatever activity they like and play games. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand it's nice to see the kids having fun and creating chaos, but on the other hand it seems a little unstructured and random and maybe the kids need more attention. It is very useful to me to see such a unique style of classroom environment because I have learned the positives and negatives of this.

Today - 4th March 2008

My second day of work experience. The day started off with helping in the numeracy class with the PGCE student. I would mention names but I think it best to keep things anonymous. This time, I was allowed to get involved as the PGCE student was not being observed. Everyone was learning how to produce block charts. I thought there was a mistake at first, I thought they were meant to be called bar graphs but it turns out I learnt something new along with the children. Block graphs are when there are gaps left between each column! I felt bad not knowing that. They were learning how to produce a graph that showed how many people in the class liked each of the 5 different types of drink written on the board. I then sat with one of the children's table's while they filled in their own graph based on how many people had voted for each different type of activity such as drawing or lego. Some children understood the concept straight away, while others really struggled so it was great for me because I really got to help the children improve their understanding and in effect, practise my teaching. One boy really stood out as gifted, he found the work too easy and finished almost straight away, I was impressed! After this lesson I was with another class again of age 6-7. It was an ICT lesson and the children were in a computer suite learning how to edit simple sentences such as how to delete a word or add in a capital letter. This teacher had a totally different teaching style, which really differenciated from other teachers because she is quite strict and often raises her voice to say something, even when the kids are not being naughty. However, this method also works well as the kids respect her authority. I even had to tell off a couple of girls who were poking eachother and I was amazed when they listened to me and started behaving properly. I had shocked myself because I have been finding it a lot easier than I thought to be firm and also be friends with the children. Again I found that most of them were desperate to ask me questions to the point where I had to tell them to put their hands up if they wanted help and to sit quietly and wait for me because everyone was shouting for me or coming over all at once and tugging me over to their desks! I couldn't help but find it amusing when some of the children were slightly misunderstanding the idea of deleting one word only in their work and accidentally deleting the whole document!!! Unfortunately I'm not sure the teacher was very computer literate, as she was explaining to them that a desktop is any window that they open with pictures in it (she actually had the control panel open and was telling them it was called the desktop!) but of course I didn't say anything!

After lunch, I spent the whole time particularly enjoying myself because I helped in an art class with the children aged 5-6. This is the best lesson I have helped in so far because it relates to my studies and degree in illustration and I was given free reign to pretty much teach the children. Again, they all concentrated on what I was saying and they crowded around for help. I admit that I also liked the lesson because the idea was to pick an animal and then make a drawing or collage of it and I know quite a bit about animals and also LOVE animals so I could tell them interesting facts about them and give them ideas for creating fur textures etc. I can't explain how much I liked the children's drawings they were just so fantastic. All of the drawings just looked so cute and funny. So, to show you how lovely the pictures were, I have attached most of them to this blog. The little boy who made James the polar bear really was just soooo sweet, he was very quiet and hard working and I spent a lot of time with him showing him different ways to make the arms and helping him cut and stick things. I also had to blow his nose for him, a new experience for me, hehe (at one point I couldn't tell what was snot and what was pva glue).