I've been very slow to start with this blogging stuff but I thought, as a student teacher specialising in computing and ICT, it's something I should probably get my head around it sooner rather than later.
I have found university life fantastic and am loving the independence in particular. I've already had my first placement, which I failed to create a blog about! But just to briefly sum it up...I worked with a year 1 class at Mayflower Academy with another first year student at the university. In the first week I was mainly used as an additional teaching assistant, acting as support for one table of low ability children, taking small guided reading sessions and other general jobs such as creating resources and marking books.
I did take the role as the class teacher more in the second week where I read books to the class, took a phonics lesson with my placement partner using "Phonics Bug" and took a full maths lesson as a pair which was assessed by a tutor from the university (which went well from her feedback!). I found the experience exhausting but overall very enjoyable! I do however regret not taking more chances to work with the class as a whole and for not getting myself involved in extra curricular activities- which I will for sure on my next placement!
Skip forward a fair few weeks...Today I was in Montpelier Primary school where we were teaching a science lesson on observation to groups of 8 year 3 children. This was done as a team of 4 student teachers (essentially we had 2 children each). We devised a lesson where we got the children closing their eyes and passing around objects that they had to describe using their senses and encouraging the use of strong adjectives. The lesson went fantastically! All the children engaged well with the lesson and seemed to be enjoying it just as much as us student teachers.
The only downfalls of the lesson came from the introduction and conclusion. The introduction wasn't quite followed by the plan we made and the conclusion was rushed but also not really planned at all.
