Time to Teach.

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Pheewww!
What a week! I have just finished my first week of Prac at Botany Public School on a darling little year 3 class. I had so much fun, but boy, it was hard work!

My co-operating teacher, Kim Briggs, is fantastic. So helpful and encouraging, she has let me find my feet in her classroom.

Wednesday was my first real teaching day, and since they are doing the COGS unit of 'Growth and Change', I decided to present a lesson on the skeletal system. It went really well, the children were engaged and enthusiastic about the activity (naming bones, pretending we have no bones, making their own skeleton poster).

Thursday, I presented an 'interactive tangram lesson' on their newly installed Smartboard. I first read a story (Grandfather Tang's Story) which focused on Tangrams - which they loved! Then I explained what Tangrams were, their history and had this site up on the smartboard behind me: http://pbskids.org/cyberchase/games/area/tangram.html
They loved getting up and having a go at 'rotating' and 'flipping' the shapes to make the different animals and objects.

On Friday I presented a 'social maths' lesson, which basically allows the children to have 'free play' but with mathematic activities. I didn't explain things well in this lesson, so everyone was a bit confused. But I brought everyone back on the floor and re-explained everything, so everyone understood at the end. There were 4 'stations' of activities:
1) Interactive Tangrams
2) Ruler/Cube game
3) Geometric shape building
4) 3D Shape building
The essence of 'social maths' is for the teacher to allow children to discover mathematical concepts for themselves. I just walked around while they were playing and asked them open-ended questions about the games they were playing.

Overall, it was a great week. The school is so supportive of young teachers and prac students, so we are all made to feel welcome. Also, the school places emphasis on implementing technology, and I was so impressed to see that all teachers had MacBooks in their rooms, along with their own smartboards, and the library had about 30 large MacBooks. Really great resources!

Next week I plan to do lessons on:
- the circulatory system
- portraits in cubist style (using Mr Picasso Head)
- book review on Tohby Riddle's 'The Singing Hat' to encourage a more defined vocab
- more maths games
- a interactive science experiment (any ideas anyone! I have NO idea about science!)

7th Teaching Day

Friday 11th September:

Like Tuesday, hardly any teaching took place today as there were lots of disruptions to class time such as Gymnastics, Kite Making at the Bondi Pavillion and Mathletics in the afternoon. I really only had the morning session (40 minutes) to help finish off the kite collages with them.

I was terrible at organising the finish of this lesson! Things were disorganised, I couldn’t find any more string for people who ran out of it, and I didn’t instruct them concisely enough! It wasn’t disasterous, but I realise it could have been done more clearly and efficiently!

In the end, everyone was finished, and their collages look great! The lesson definitely needs some tweaking, but I know that when I do this type of lesson again, I will not make the same mistakes. Learning from your mistakes I believe is the best way of learning, as it shows you the worst of what could happen, and then ways around it so as to not make the same mistake in the future!

6th Teaching Day

Thursday 10th September:

Today was a good day, behaviour wise, however my teaching could have been better. I planned to teach a Visual Arts lesson on Collage, making links to HSIE and Maths. The Festival of the Winds at Bondi Beach is a large kite-flying event that the school is directly part of, and so I decided that this would be the focus of the Art Lesson. I made my own model of a collage of kites flying in the sky, using watercolour for a background wash, different coloured kite shapes with patterns, and then string. My tertiary supervisor unexpectedly came in to watch that lesson, which made me quite nervous, but I got a good report, which was a relief!

I first made them close their eyes and imagine what the sky would look like full of kites, how they felt, what colours they saw, who was there, were they flying the kite etc. Then I asked them these questions, using group alerting (especially on the child that seems disinterested in most things). This strategy worked well, as it made him actually look and think before responding and then he got into the lesson with excitement.

I spoke about Kites, how they flew, what you needed to fly a kite, who owned a kite, who had been to the festival before. I also explained the nature of a collage, and that it was about using lots of different materials to create a whole picture that looked good. I used the small portable whiteboard again, which I think is so vital as you don’t need to disturb the class by turning your back on them. I pinned my model collage to the whiteboard and went through how I did the artwork, and explained things like shape and pattern to them (revising the 2D shape lesson I did with them previously).

Explaining how to perform this task was difficult as I had originally planned to use the Art Room, but another class desperately needed to use it so I had to fit in and use my classroom, which was not set up as well as the Art room was. I made them repeat the instructions back to me, and said I could only have 4 children painting at a time, and only people that were really working hard would be first. They all seemed really into it, and they loved my model collage which was flattering (it was met with lots of “ooooaaaaahhhh’s!”).

It was difficult organising the children into groups of who was painting and who was designing their patterns, and I would do it much differently if I had to do it again. The lesson went for longer than an hour, and even then the children couldn’t finish, so I would have to continue it tomorrow.

I really enjoy art, and this lesson was no exception. Although some kids were almost too excited about this and it was hard to organise, seeing kids painting and enjoying it really made me happy. Definitely will be doing more Art in the future with them!

*Image: 'His Feast' www.flickr.com/photos/66076061@N00/3391380208