back for my last week at my school

I cannot believe how fast that two week holiday break was.  I had so many plans for doing some blog posts about the lessons I did so I had a record to remind myself if nothing else but the first week I ended up in bed with the worst flu that I have ever had - it knocked me for six.  Of course its par for the course with teaching that you get the holiday flu/cold.

The second week was spent marking, completing assessments and binding the books they had written and still recovering so energy was very low!  And of course the best past time of all blog stalking (you can do that from bed so a great pass time).

I am back in my school for this week, its my last week which is sad in itself, but what is even worse is that I'm not getting to teach.  I'm just observing and its so hard to just sit back and jump in when needed or to get myself involved.  The neat thing is that my associate teacher has left for her overseas trip which means there is a reliever in for the next few weeks.  This relief teacher is really dynamic in her teaching and really willing to share her knowledge.  She has a complete focus on maths (which I love) and is concentrating on basic facts and multiplication with the class.  Just about all of the class has some major gaps with this area which considering they are 9 - 11 year olds is not good.  She believes in getting the students moving and playing games to learn the knowledge to ensure its deep quick knowledge not something they need to stop and think about.  I will end up learning a lot from her and I am adding to my collection of notes for when I finally have a class of my own.

I cannot believe that I have to go back to University in four weeks and spend another four months studying, I just want to teach.  Although in saying that I have been having nightmares about planning for everything for a whole year and the testing and the assessments and the marking and the students and the..... shoot got to stop thinking about it before I run to the hills screaming LOL.

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Week 4 of my placement is finished

I cannot believe that it has been four weeks already.

I have just finished my third week of full control and it has been wonderful.  As frustrating, and talkative the kiddos have been at times they have also been funny, and entertaining and interesting and delightful.  I have been loving almost every minute of it.  I know that this is where I want to be - and I think I have actually found the age group I want to teach.

I have always thought I wanted to teach the littlies, thought that that is where my heart would belong and I would not enjoy the bigger kids.   I was wrong I LOVE teaching 9 to 10 year olds.   I love how their brains work, I love doing the higher grade stuff with them, I love their thirst for knowledge and acceptance and success, and I love their sense of humour and the one liners they can come out with!!

The disappointing thing is I only have two weeks left of my full control (I'm extending to five weeks which helps out the relief teacher who comes in for the last week of the term), and then I have to hand my class back.  I don't want to.  I want to keep teaching them.  I don't want to go back to University and study.  I want to be a teacher and get to keep my kiddo's.  It's not fair :(

Yep throwing a sad face fit that its all going to be over soon

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Maths Planning for Statistics completed - at last

It has been a long week sorting out my unit plan for teaching statistics on my placement.  Its been a long process working out what to teach and how to teach it.  Not having any history to fall back to has been hard going.  That and of course repeatedly second guessing myself again and again and again meant it no doubt took a lot longer than it should.  I so want it to be perfect or at least as perfect as possible on paper as it can be.  I am well aware that as planned as I might be on paper when I add that missing ingredient of students all the plans in the world may not save me and it may all have to go out the window.  

The brief for this placement is that we are sole charge teaching for 3 to 4 weeks - of which I am a mixture of excited and cannot wait and terrified.  On this placement we do not have to have detailed individual lesson plans but we must have unit plans and day plans. 

So last night I was deeply satisfied - I thought I had my unit plan nailed, I had teacher talk, student talk, foldables and examples to work through and a big project for them to apply the knowledge to (I even had a cross curricular link to the Inquiry topic they are doing  - go me!!). 

Let me tell you last night was the first sleep I have had in two weeks that did not involved nightmares about lesson plans and teaching I felt that good.  This morning I went on line to check up on the wonderful ladies and guys) that I follow and read a post from Fourth Grade Studio  (http://www.theteacherstudio.com/) that talked about her lesson with the dot plot and getting her students involved in creating and testing graphs for themselves.  That's when I realised my great mistake in my planning, I had not included any part in the first week of the students getting up and testing and applying the concept!!! It has been a long day of typing and re writing and I only had a small break (taking my boys to Iron Man 3 in 3D - okay a 3 hour break, but it didn't feel long) to sort it out.

Although disappointed that I went from yes its all done to how could I be so stupid I am forever grateful that I found out today rather than when on my placement and I loose the students to boredom.

So now at the end of the day and only minutes from bed, I can finally say that it is finished and I am pretty sure I have a good plan up my sleeve.  Now I just need to write a unit on time for my non full control time and I'm done, thankfully with the time one I have all the notes and ideas so for the most part I am ready to go...I think...

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have met the class for this year

Its been a busy and interesting week this week observing a teacher as she sets up her classroom for the year and gets to know the children of her class.

I realise how much I have learnt over the last two years as I do my observations and can relate what I see back to what we have talked about back at Uni, but also when I see practise that is different to how I would want to run my classroom. 

I am by no means being smart arse enough to say I know better, only that I am starting to develop how I want to be a teacher and there are a few small things that I have observed I would do different.  But I think that is part of the learning journey as well, you learn from things you agree with and you learn from those you disagree with. 

The best thing is, is that what I would change is small which means working with this teacher is still great and there is a lot I will be able to learn from her and she is being amazingly generous in sharing her knowledge and resources.

While I wanted to work in a school that is known for its challenging children, I will still have a few challenges with the children from this class with a child with Aspergers, a child with ADHD and a few with very strong stroppy personalities that will still make teaching fun and interesting.  It is also a school which caters to a low economic area but refuses to accept anything but the child doing their very best and refuses to let the students be a negative stat nor a stereo type with almost all the children excelling at reading, writing, and maths and amazing programmes for those children struggling.  I am going to enjoy these first few weeks of observing and coming back in a couple of months to teach!!!

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