School Life

Good morning! We'll what a week I have had at school, learnt so much in such a short space of time. The class I am in has a digital microscope, which I didn't use this week, but I have used one in our science lesson a few weeks ago, so i will know how to use it when I am teaching if it is appropriate for the lesson. There is also an Interactive White Board, a Smart Board version, so now I am going to download the software so that I can prepare lessons at home to use at school.

There was a spare classroom at the school that I was given for some lessons to teach a small group, so I was able to use the smartboard in my lessons. The first lesson I used it in was a lesson about using onomatopoeia's when writing firework poems. I searched on google and found a great powerpoint presentation with good sound on it, so I used this with the children and they loved it. They were able to really contribute to the lesson and were really engaged. I had them reading the Guy Fawkes rhyme altogether and a line of the poem each as we went through it. When they then wrote their own fireworks poems they worked really well were well focused and worked well as a team, helping eachother with spellings and deciding if a word was an omomatopieia. The second lesson I used it for was a program about using apostophes, it was supposed to be an interactive program, but when I asked the children to move the words around on the screen to fit into the correct boxes it didn't work. I still need more practice and to develop a better understanding of how the interactive bit of the board works, but the children were really keen and enjoyed seeing things on the board as opposed to just being read to, it helped them to connect to what they were learning.

I taught the whole class for literacy on Friday and the teacher observed me. One of the comments he said was that I wasn't talking when I was writing on the board, which could allow the children to start messing around, or start chatting. He said that I could have used the smart board and allowed the children to write on their words themselves. I had forgotten that they could do that, so agreed with the teacher that we would have a closer look at the IWB on the serial days in November, so that I am much clearer of it's functions.

It's going to be very strange going back to uni next week, I wish we were staying in schools, the children have just started listening to me and coming to me and feeling happy with my presence and I leave again! I hope that when I go back in November I don't have to start all over again with them and that the groundwork I've put in this week hasn't gone to waste! We'll just have to wait and see... Bye for now!