A day late

Apologise I am a day late but Mr 6 had a birthday, first week back at work and my parents are visiting so somewhat chaotic.

Working in a team we have decided to do a Thursday rotation. We are lucky enough that the year 3 and 4’s at our school get a 30 minutes sports programmed taught by an outside agency every week. So instead of a day where everything would be chaotic with children coming in and out, we decided to plan this day as our rotation day.

 We looked at what we still had to cover in the curriculum and how this would tie in with us and the subject areas we all had strengths in. Being only 30 minutes long we had to be realistic with what we could teach in that time. We didn’t want children having to rush work to get it finished or come back to it later. We wanted to teach activities that would relate to our Values and our Spirit of Spreydon therefore we could incorporate this into our learning as well.

In the end we decided on 30 minute rotations of Music, Dance/Drama, Maori and Maths and Sports (one teacher had to be present with the outside PE activities). We decided that it was easier if the children stayed in their homeroom groups rather than mixing them up.

So yesterday, we began this and I have to admit it worked well. We all enjoy teaching subjects we know well and enjoy. I take the Maths and have envisaged using a lot of games and team activities. At the moment I am just looking at number activities and this was the one I taught yesterday ' Strike it out for Two'.

I have to admit it was great fun. Easy enough to do but I also had the ability to make it even easier or harder for those who needed it. Having only met this year group it can be quite hard planning activities this early on that cater for all abilities but I am glad with this one I could. It is also a very new experience for me teaching lower down. I have spent the last year teaching year 5 and 6 students who have been working at Stage 7/8 so going back to children who still needed the basics and been great and I have enjoyed the challenge.

I have to admit at the start I thought I may get a little bored teaching the same game to 5 different classes but to be honest this never happened. Every class I had, I saw ways to adapt and make my teaching even better.  From past experiences, I know when you plan together you take into account your own class maybe different and you would adapt it to suit them. But most primary school teachers only teach that one class and that one lesson. So this was slightly different. I was planning the one lesson for five classes and having to quickly adjust as I was teaching depending on the class I was taking. This will get easier as I get to know the classes though.

I am really looking forward to the rotation day although having to learn 120 children’s name maybe a challenge in itself!