Term 1: 5th-6th

What were the highlights?
I really enjoyed being able to spend more time in each class. We were in three classrooms a day instead of 5+.
I also enjoyed being able to retake the year 2 group for PE again this week. I planned the lesson before hand and we established boundaries for the kids. We had a bigger group this week of 12 but because we had planned it this wasn't an issue. I was able to do a warm up go over skills and work with the kids before ending with a game. I also enjoyed seeing phonics again this week and seeing some of the great writing that the kids were doing.
This week me and one of my other candidate teachers also started taking a dance group of mostly boys at lunch to help them compose a dance for the dance festival competition. It was fun to see the kids come up with moves on their own and was also a good opportunity to get to manage a group of kids on our own while also taking part in the school.

What were the challenges?
A challenge for me was finding a classroom that could fully demonstrate cultural differences and how a teacher accommodated them because at our school although there is different cultures there is not a lot of them and all the English as a second language children are reasonably well adapted. We did find a class in the end though where the teacher was able to help us and show how he accommodates his student. Something I also find a bit of a challenge is learning about classroom management because they do not need to use a whole lot of it at our school but when I take the kids or PE myself I need to know how to because they want to push boundaries. 


What did you learn?
I learnt a lot about the new entrants this week. They have so much to learn and you have to have a lot of patience with them. It is also so important to make their first school experience a positive one, which is a big responsibility. I also learnt about gymnastics with the year ones and how some children are just learning to balance' or they really struggle with it and one child couldn't manage her forward rolls at all. But again it was about making it a positive experience for them especially if they we're struggling. It was important to work with struggling kids so they could see they could improve and leave with a positive attitude..