Day 114: 24/4/13
Today I was back in the same school I was in on Monday. I was with year 1 and 2 for most of the morning. I noticed the last day that this school has a good few male teachers and there was even more of them hiding in 1/2!! The first two classes I was with were working together to do Maths. So I was helping a group that were measuring people's height using unifix cubes- that was busy! The next class I went to had a student teacher so she was leadingthe class. They were drawing a picture for what they do at each hour of the day. There were a few boys in there that were really bold and they didn't pay her any attention at all! I wouldn't be looking forward to the rest of my teaching practice with them if I was her!! Then the whole school gathered in the yard for an Anzac Day memorial service. There were some prayers and poems read out about Anzac Day. I didn't realise that it is celebrated on the 25th as that's the day the Anzac army arrived in Gallipoli to start fighting in 1915, World War 1. A girl played the call that's usually played on a bugle when someone dies and they raised the Australian flag. They had a minutes silence and they sang the national anthem. It was very sombre and all the kids seemed to respect that.
After break I was in another 1/2 class where there was a student teacher teaching a writing lesson. They use seeds for their writing so she gave them all a feather and they had to brainstorm where the feather may have come from and write a plan for a story. When there's a student teacher it's great!! After that I had pe- it was a 3/4 class and they were all set up doing a t-ball rotation. Some were batting the ball off the tee and trying to hit goals, others were trying to get it past defenders and others were trying to hit it in a straight line between a row of cones. They got fairly bored with it but I didn't care, as long as they didn't bat each other! A year 1/2 class arrived for pe then just as the teacher came back, so that was good!! I had to go to an art class then and I had one of the 1/2 classes I'd been with for Maths in the morning. The teacher gave me a note saying what she wanted us to do and that everything was set up. The note said they were going to do blowpainting- lovely!! I hadn't done blowpainting before but I know you use a straw to blow paint! We were supposed to brainstorm where we see various water patterns and then look at examples of blowpaintings. I dragged that out as much as possible hoping the teacher would come back but there was no sign of her so we had to move on to demonstrating the blowpainting! Two girls said they had done it before so they demonstrated. My main query was whether you suck the paint into the straw or not. I was hoping not!! The girls just rubbed the straw in the paint which was watered down and then blew- we tried to get different patterns and blow it in different directions so that people could see how to do it. The teacher still hadnt come back so I had to give them the straws and let them off. They were really careful with them and didn't make a huge mess!! The paintings seemed to turn out like the ones left from the class beforehand so they must have been doing it right! Everyone was finished and we were discussing what we could do differently next time when the teacher came back! She was about 20 minutes late- I don't know what was going on in her performance meeting!! I had to go to prep then and there were two classes working together so I just had to watch a few minutes of maths before the 2nd break. They were playing a game called write a number where the teacher called out a number and then picked someone to write it on the board. I don't know if I'd call that a game!! What was impressive though was that they were writing numbers up to and bigger than 100. At home infants learn numbers to 10. They may no more but they don't concentrate on 11-20 until 1st class!
I had duty at 2nd break. Some boys were arguing and I just caught the end of it. It was near their classroom and their teacher came out just the same time as I got there and he went after the child who had stormed off in behind a shed!!
After break I was with another prep class. They had to read to a buddy, then change their readers and then we were to do the letter f. They thought of lots of words and were then getting very restless. There was a student teacher there too but the teacher had told her to watch me to get a different perspective- that was great when I know feck all about preps and I had no activities in my head for them to do about the letter f!! So I decided we'd learn a quick song for the last few minutes!! The student teacher and the teacher when she came back seemed to be very interested in the song and then it dawned on me that they probably never do any songs with them as music is done by a specialist teacher!
There was a bit of confusion about where I was supposed to be for the last half hour as I was to cover for the Chinese teacher but he didn't have a class. When I went to the office to see what was going on the woman there have me a little bar of chocolate that the principal said to give me to thank me for running around all day! It ended up anyway that I had to bring some 5/6s over to a prep class for buddy reading, which was nice!
On the way home I had an email with a payslip from the last week of the sales job! I wasn't sure if they were going to hold onto the wages for some weeks r not as they can hold onto them for 45 days so I was delighted to be paid!!
I extended my stay in the hostel for another week with the money and then I decided Id treat myself to the cinema. There's a film out wit Gerard Butler that I wanted to see- Olympus has fallen. People attack the White House and he's a die hard type character that has to try to save the President. It was really good- I think it may be better than die hard!! It was completely predictable and didn't require any major thinking or anything so some people will probably say it was stupid but it was funny!