St Johns, Totnes. Saturation Week Part 2

Wednesday: Morning was spent with year 5 who were acting out stories from the book 1001 Arabian nights. This is an interesting and fun way to develop story recalling skills. After a discussion with the class teacher I learnt that the children will be writing their own stories based on the stories in 1001 Arabian nights but from a different culture. I found this cross curricular link with geography interesting.

In the afternoon me and my partner took 10 of the year 6 children to do our lesson. The lesson was on how sound travels. The main part of the lesson was a game where one child sits blindfolded with various metal objects around them- the other children had to steal these without the blindfolded child noticing- I thought that this lesson went pretty well.

There was also an incident where two girls had to be rescued from sinking mud by a few of us student teachers. This was during a hide-and-seek game and the girls were told not to go into the bog. The girls were completely covered in mud. Instead of shouting at the girls the teachers calmly dealt with it and explained that the girls were not naughty girls but had just made the wrong decision for not listening to them.

For the rest of the afternoon we carried on using up the wood chippings to cover muddy areas of the school ground.

Thursday: Spent the morning in year 4 again who were having a maths lesson on fractions. The class teacher had some interesting methods such as "ping-pong" where she called a number and the children would have to double it. She also used a reward scheme where if a child answered a question out loud without any child they would get 2 points for their group, if they asked for teacher support they would get 1 and they could phone a friend and get 1 point.

Afternoon with year 6 was spent taking various bits and pieces to the skip and taking soil from the car park to a dumpy bag in the school groups. We were given a S.P.A.G of the day which was to encourage the children to take note when they said a preposition as they worked.