Friday, August 13, 2010

August Thirteen, Two Thousand + Ten

Today I spent the entire day at the primary school.

My main aim of today was to introduce the beebots to the children and to gather information. I feel that today I completed both of these objectives well, though a significant number of children were away today so there will be a need to revisit the beebots with the children again.

This morning I ran the beebots outside in the bagroom. As it was the children's first time seeing and using the beebots I elected this space so that the children would not distract the other children that were at the other tables and that the beebots worked with more ease on the lino as opposed to the carpet.

I was quite thrilled with the amount of knowledge and information that the children were gaining and using during the discussions. Just being outside with the children and having my notebook was highly beneficial to me. Though I do think that I will need to record their voices to really hear the discussions and questioning that is taking place. Even though there was one beebot per child, the children were still communicating and discussing what was happening in pairs or just voicing what was happening to all the children. The amount of noise that occurred was incredible, but it was an excited noise and made me realise that this is a fantastic tool for learning.

I noticed that some children were having difficulties grasping the concept of pressing the clear button after they had programmed to refresh the beebots memory or that they needed to programme the beebot then press the go button {some would press the go button first or would programme the beebot but not press go}.

During the first session of fifteen minutes that we had outside, I used this time to have the children get to know what the beebots could do. How they moved and just have fun with them. In the last five minutes, I used the opportunity to have a race with the children, asking them to count how many times they were going to press the up arrow. This allowed the children to use estimation, measurement and space.

During the second session of fifteen minutes, I used the first five minutes for the children to just re-play with the beebots, recall what we had discussed before moving inside to draw pictures of what the beebots were doing. I also had the children tell me a sentence about this, which was incredible as two children who do not speak very often in class and don't often participate to their full potential latched onto the idea of the beebots and really gained a lot from just those 30 minutes.

The rest of the day consisted of sport, news, mathematics and then music and movement in the afternoon. I ran the news + mathematics session. Similar to how I did when I was there back in March. After sport I am noticing that a few of the children are just very hard to get back into work mode. Therefore, I am going to either find mathematics based games for that session or we will do science which is more hands on and would therefore allow the children to use the energy that they still have from sport.

I took photographs in the morning of the room and its set up.

Over the weekend I will be working on my ideas and plans for the coming week as I will be running the literacy groups from Thursday and running the room on Friday with the casual teacher.

There are some issues in relation to privacy and permission notes that I need to email relevant people about.

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