Day 127: 7/5/13
Today I was back in the school I was in most of last week, with a prep class. It was the same class Id had on Friday. The principal retired two weeks ago and this prep teacher is involved in the interviews for it. She had plenty of work left and they had some specialist subjects aswell so it was grand!
First we spoke about yes or no questions. I asked questions and they had to pick up the right one. Then there was a quiz- can you dance, can you sing, can you walk, etc. They had to go and make their own quiz. There were flash cards with pictures with the words for dance, sing, jump, etc so they could write them but when thy swapped their quiz to answer yes or no they couldn't read them!! I should have realised that but sometimes preps here are so well able to go that I forget how little they can do!
Then they had science so I brought them to the science room and another teacher taught the lesson. I stayed and helped out. They were cutting out skeletons and putting split pins in the joints which was quite hard for them too! I had heard talk about dojo during the week and I didn't know what it was but this teacher was using it. It's a website where you upload your class and then you can give them points based on their behaviour. You can decide what behaviours you are looking for. It looks pretty good but not sure how time consuming it would be, especially in our school when the Internet doesn't work properly!!
After break they had Art so I was sent to a year 5/6 class. They were doing a practice Naplan test for Maths. At home were not supposed to practice the tests! Here it seems like there's a different Naplan every year maybe? They were grand during the test but fairly giddy afterwards! I was surprised that the test was relatively easy. I was expecting it to be much harder than ones we'd have at home but it wasn't.
After lunch, we had integrated studies where we were looking at what animals might be out at night time and how they have big eyes and pupils. Then we did show and tell, which they have every day! Finally, we went to the library for computers. They were supposed to work on the reading eggs website. When we got there all the computers had been turned off so we had to wait for them all to turn on again and then type in reading eggs and the password in every computer!! Half of them wouldn't work. I figured out after about ten minutes that I had to allow the blocked content to bring the website properly. It took ages to get as many of them set up as possible. A lot shared computers but a few of them ended up crying as they didn't get their turn! How well we had computers last in the day!!
Aoife was in the school again today. I didn't really get a chance to talk to her in school but we were chatting on the train. She was there yesterday, today and she has Wednesday and Friday aswell. It's nice to be going to the same place but its fairly far away for her.
I got a call when I was still on the train to go back to the school I was in on Monday, so that's another long train. (That's why the blog is late going up, I left it to do on the train).
I didn't do much for the evening. I read a bit and spent some time looking at websites and stuff that they use over here. I have loads of ideas now Id like to try in the class when I go back, but I don't know how I'll fit them into the timetable!!