St Johns, Totnes. Saturation Week Part 1

This week I have been on placement at St John's Primary in Totnes working with year 6. Throughout the week the university students and the year 6 class has been working together in order to achieve the John Muir award. The award is based on conservation and is split into four sections discover, explore, conserve and share and the children learn about the nature around their school and the importance of conserving it.

Each day we spend the morning observing a different class in the school and in the afternoon we return to year 6 to work on the award.

Monday: Spent the morning with year 4 where they were making shoe box worlds based on stories they wrote before half term (these were inspired by the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe).

At lunch the KS1 children were kept in for wet play. Instead of the usual manic I've found at every-other placement I've been on, at St Johns they put the children in the hall and played Just Dance. Obviously it was not played with everyone having a controller instead the children just spread out and tried to copy the dance moves on the screen, very entertaining to watch and allowed them to get some exercise even though they couldn't go outside.

In the afternoon we met the year 6's that we'd been spending the week with and went out to explore the surrounding woods with them and to see what jobs need to be done by the end of the week.

Tuesday: Morning was spent in year 2. I was surprised as to how well behaved these children are, in the hour I was there, there was not one problem with behavior.

The school has DPA (Designated Physical Activity) where the children go out into the playground between lessons to have a 2 minute run around. This I think is a great idea as it helps to get their blood flowing which helps them to concentrate in their next lesson.

In the afternoon we gathered branches which we used to create hurdles and my group started on our main job which was to put wood chippings down over a boggy area. The hurdle fence making was very interesting to learn and was something a bit different.

More to come...

Stories without words

Last week as part of my ICT and computing seminars we had the task of making a story about Plymouth's history without using words.

On the first day of the project we walked about Plymouth learning a bit about its history and gathering photos to use for our videos.

The second day we were told simply to make a film which has no words that tells a story about Plymouth's history. Me and Frances decided to make ours on Plymouth's war history. We first edited the photos that we'd gathered making them black and white and removing the ones that we weren't going to use. Then using Apple imovie on my ipad we put the pictures together and added sound effects from the software itself.

Overall we thought our film was pretty good, though with more time I'm sure we could make it a lot better. Neither of us had used the imovie software before but after having a play we found it very easy to use and great for making short videos. Software that I might look to use in the classroom in the future because of its simplicity.

At the end of the second day each group presented their videos. Everybody had gone a slightly different way about it. Different groups took a different aspect of Plymouth's history and various software was used to create the videos. No group had gone the same way about the project. Every groups video was original.

This was the result of us being given little details about the task. We were purposely given little instruction so we could go our own ways on the project and be creative. We weren't restrained to strict instructions- which would of lead to very similar end results. I think this is a great teaching approach to use in my own teaching practice as it develops problem solving skills, independence and is very engaging.

Below is a link to mine and Frances Dingle's video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQd696jd71w

Probably time to make my first blog...

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.