Shakespeare Primary School

01/05/2018

7:30 am – Arrive at Shakespeare

8:00 am – get into the classroom and set up, get books out etc.

8:30 am – Students come into class ready for the day. Quick maths exercise to start the day off.

9:30 am – Geography – during geography I worked with a table who struggling with geography, I worked close to a young girl who is working at a low year 2, she needs lots of help and often will copy what the person next to her had written. I worked with her and found it hard to get through to her, she just wanted the answers and not the method of doing it, we had to look at atlases and find a country the teacher had put on the board using coordinates. She was able to understand the idea of the exercise but could do it by her self.

10:30 am – Break

11:00 am – Practice run of my lesson with the other year 4 class – before I taught my lesson which was being observed I taught it to the other year 4 class. I started telling them to get changed as quickly as they could and to line up at the door. When that was done, I went out to the MUGA and began pairing them up in twos or three, I wanted them to list as many keywords about the digestive system as they could, they really enjoyed being outside doing this instead of the classroom. They managed that very well and completed it quickly, I then started to get them to explain a word each that they wrote. After this was completed, we got into the main activity, pretending to be the digestive system. Some people were food and others were teeth and enzymes, they really enjoyed this and had a lot of fun. However, I decided to remove the idea of enzymes, in my second lesson, because some of them were getting a bit carried away and this could have led to an accident. At the end of the lesson, I gathered them around a asked them questions about the digestive system, they all showed good knowledge and sound understanding. I asked them if they want to do it quickly one last time, they all screamed yes! I think that’s a good sign that they liked it.

12:00 am – Lunch

1:00 pm – Meet observer and get ready for my lesson – what I decided to change my previous lesson because I think it did not work very well, timing – my timings were off a bit in the first lesson, it only lasted 30 minutes and I needed it to last 40, so what I could do it get them to discuss among themselves for a bit after each time we gather in and ask questions. I also introduce a  part that when you go through the digestive system, you have to shout what organ you are in, to show me understanding. The lesson began on the wrong foot, Plymouth Argyle kicked me off the MUGA for there lesson, even though I previously booked it a week in advance. However, I tried to make it work, so we moved outside the MUGA, it was a lot smaller so I had to make the digestive system smaller, this was a mistake, in hindsight I wish I stood up to Argyle and said I booked the MUGA. Other than that not much more went wrong, they got themselves in pairs and completed the whiteboard activity, then completed the digestive system, and we then spoke about it, then they discussed it in pairs and came back to me what they had said, they all really enjoyed doing the digestive system. An issue with the activity was that there was a lot of waiting around and waiting for them to complete it. If I was to do it again, I would have got them into two groups and made one group replicated what I had set out with cones, so that they could all being engaged instead of them being lined up waiting to have a go.

2:00 pm – Assembly

3:30 pm – Home

see my photos here.

see my lesson plan here.