Day 7

In the morning I had to teach a poetry writing lesson. Me, who hasn't written any poetry since I was the same age as these kids. I never liked poetry, I tried studying it at Uni out of a sense of obligation, but gave up on it pretty soon. I mistimed my lesson yet again.

Having trawled the internet for poetry writing ideas I had settled on the idea of teaching alliiteration and tongue twisters. Every child in the class wanted to have a go at saying the tongue twister and then telling me every other tongue twister they knew of, which was good, but time consuming. I wanted them to have a go at writing a tongue twister themselves, after all it was a writing lesson, and thus made a panicked decision not to write up the structure on the board. I had already got into trouble with Rebecca several times for writing on the board in front of the students and not having stuff prepared, so skipped the [who - did what - to who or what - when] bit that they really needed in retrospect to put their poems together. Tomorrow I have another writing lesson so will pick up where I left off then.

After recess I had number two in my series of maths lessons. It was a big improvement on yesterday's lessons. We weighed all the objects as a group, with all the students getting a go using the balance. I was happy trading off order for more student centred learning. Hopefully with more experience classroom management and more free form learning will have a better chance at coexistence. All my lesson objectives were met but some students still experienced some confusion about when to use grams or kilograms. Some conversion practice might be a good idea for tomorrow.

At the end of the day I had a computer studies lesson. Another dreaded event. The school computer room is an echoey converted hallway between the year 2s and 3s. There are always children running through and with all my students necessarily facing away from me towards a computer I could foresee disaster. I was showing them how to draw boxes and arrows in WordArt and it went surprisingly well, even given that the Word version the school has differs remarkably from my Mac version. A lot of the students were really good at helping out other students in the room, and after I had given each instruction I wandered around the room and helped out those still having trouble. the ones who got it quickly had fun discovering and playing with the other options.

But after teaching 3 lessons in a day, boy am I exhausted. And its only Tuesday and I've yet to prepare 4 lessons for tomorrow. Aaargh.