Today was a bit of a busy day. It began with Art cover which, because of art exams, was shunted off into the Rural Science “building”. Amongst the chickens, giant snails, terrapins and rats that were in my classroom were some children. They alternated between being distracted by pot-bellied pigs and a cockerel with a really beady evil looking eye.

After that amusement I had maths, where I am a support assistant and usually end up learning more maths than the kids do! For example I now know the “grid method” for multiplication. It looks so much easier than the twaddle I was taught in Maths.

Then it was my year 7 group that I was being observed in. First though I had to spend break setting up the room. The projector’s bulb has gone, and the projector is so old it’s cheaper to buy a new one rather than replace the bulb. This is crazy and a reason why I’m not buying one myself. I put a spare projector on the centre table and shined it at a handy wall, using my laptop as the source.

The lesson itself went well. The kids giving every impression that they had learnt something. Whether they’ll remember it next week is another matter I had feedback from it afterwards, and the most helpful tip was that I should just let the more able kids whizz off into the distance without stopping them to check their work. What I was doing was splitting the lesson into tasks, and at the end of each task stopping everyone to check they’d done it correctly. However it turns out it’s totally fine to just let them get on with it and check each kid by themselves.

This makes life a bit simpler, and more “personalised” which is the current in thing for lessons. Rather than simply broadcasting knowledge to the room at large, it’s seen to be better if you shovel the information into the kids individually, or in small groups.

Great stuff And tomorrow is Thursday where I have one lesson in the morning, then not a lot else since it’s either Maths support or year 12s.