New teacher's diary - November 2007
Steve Rivers (PGDE: Primary student)
The year is now flying by, having already completed the first placement in nursery school. I spent the two weeks carrying out observations, planning activities and generally fitting into the nursery team however the most important aspect was interacting with the children and the demands of this often seemed to make formal observation difficult. One or two of the children wanted to know what I was writing about that was so interesting! It felt like I was constantly in demand to read stories, become involved in outdoor activities, take a part in the children’s role play, help to build things, play music or just talk, and this made every day interesting and often tiring.
I arranged several activities and maintained a very musical theme throughout the final week which went down well with staff and children; plenty of music and dancing. I certainly felt like part of the nursery after just two weeks and will miss the children especially.
There’s been plenty of chance to share experiences with the other students over the past week back at university and these have been almost all positive. Lectures and workshops have discussed many things related to our nursery experience, such as the way numeracy and literacy emerge as children develop. It’s been enlightening to be able to analyse what we have seen children doing in their play, writing and speech and use this to determine our teaching approach to them. Now we’re straight back into the thick of it with planning for the infant placement in just three weeks. It often seems daunting to be learning to teach the entire breadth of curriculum required for the primary classroom. Workshops in PE, drama, maths, language, art and design, music and more keep it interesting to say the least. We’ve been learning to assess each others running style, make minibeasts out of brightly coloured bits and bobs, put a musical composition to a poem and plan a lesson on creative-writing. I don’t remember this much variety whilst studying something since being at primary school myself!