August Twenty, Two Thousand + Ten

The first week of the internship has officially finished. I did a full day of teaching today. I notice that when my MT is off and there is a casual on the class there are different class dynamics.

The day went well and I spoke to two parents in the morning and another in the afternoon. When I compare this to my time within Early Childhood settings, I notice a huge difference. Parents don't tend to come and talk with teachers unless there is something important that needs to be discussed.

I feel that if it was only me in the room, without the other teacher I think that the children would have been a little less noisy during times. Though I feel that even though this wasn't the case, that I was able to manage the children's behaviour effectively but I need to find new ways to do this, rather than using hands on heads.

When I had the children draw their parrots {the letter of the week is Pp}. They were a little confused at first as I had given them a blank sheet of paper and a number of bright oil pastels and crayons. Once we went through what a parrot has, its features, I was in awe and amazed at some of the fantastic parrots that the children had drawn. I sometimes feel that creativity can be limited as we can assume that they cannot do something, rather than allowing the children to try.

I am finding that having the children lay down of an afternoon, and be very still, works extremely well for allowing the children to relax after lunch. I think that I need to continue to use this.

On my other blog and its facebook fan page I put out a question about reward systems/charts and asked others what they use and what works for them. When a lot of them were specific to their own children, I asked if any were K-2 teachers and what they used. I was pleasantly surprised when I received a comment and it was of where she used dollars within the classroom and writes on them what they are awarded for and at the end of four weeks they are counted and a prize award to the table with the most dollars.

I have decided to use this within my classroom as a reward system so that I am able to see what works and doesn't work whilst I am there. Though rather than being a group effort for their tables {as they are very rarely at their tables} I will be doing individual ones. I just need to figure out what to use for each person to hold the money. Also I will be colour coding the notes, so yellow will be for listening, red for working with others, etc. I am thinking that once each child gets to ten, I will then give out an award stating what they had achieved over the last ten dollars. I feel that this will provide a talking point between home and school, and will be more than a lucky dip.

During recess and lunch, both today and yesterday I had the opportunity to speak and discuss with a number of different staff. I spoke with a casual teacher, as she has just finished her degree and was great to see a recently graduated teacher that I can discuss with about a number of different things. Also with other members on the teaching team at the school. I am really feeling a part of the team.

This weekend I will be preparing for the week ahead as I am now planning for everyday as well as the one page document to hand in to the unit conveyor.

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.