The placement that I am applying for is in a primary school Orléans, France. I will be an English language assistant in a French primary school, which will involve me teaching the French pupils how to speak English.
I chose this setting as I wanted to keep working with children in a school setting but was interested in teaching English to a totally different mother-tongue nationality and in a new cultural setting, together with the experience of the opposed classroom set up and routine.
The benefits of this placement I hope to gain are, being able to experience how to teach the very basics of English and also learn myself from it which will benefit working with young early years children back in Scotland. I hope to gain an understanding on how a different nationality picks up a new language, in particular English, as English is thought to have very difficult rule to remember and follow. I have only ever learnt in German in depth so I also hope to pick up a bit on French whilst living over there for 6 weeks, which will be a benefit when teaching in Scottish schools if I have to teach a bit of French. I will get to opportunity to be part of and experience a foreign schools way of working, including their routines, work patterns, outdoor learning and meal times. This will be an interesting comparison so what I am used to in Scotland and from that I will be able to see the advantages and disadvantages form both sides.
When I go over to Orléans I hope to bring my previous extensive experience in schools and nurseries over the past couple of years. My summer job in a nursery will be useful as I got to teach English from the very early stages of learning to write, read and talk in English. I got the opportunity to analyse how children pick up English and what activities aid them on their way. I was lucky in 1st year to get a primary 4 class, which is an advantage as they were still learning a lot of basic patterns of English; therefore I can bring my knowledge to the French school. I hope to bring my knowledge of behaviour management to the school, as I am unsure on how the behaviour in Orléans will compare to here in Scotland. I will be able to being my creative personality to the school as I think it will benefit my lessons to make them more interesting and engaging to aid the French pupils learning and memory.
During this 6-week placement I got an insight into the Scottish Primary Education system. I taught group and whole class lessons covering every curricular area. I learnt the processes and stages of teaching a lesson effectively, using engaging and positive techniques. I was challenged with have a class that had three children with learning difficulties and this was a good experience for me as I learnt a lot form them. I learnt how to deal with different behaviours effectively to get the results I wanted and how to build trust between a teacher and pupil. By the end of the placement I felt I had learnt and accomplished so much. My knowledge had grown drastically and I was able to teach a class on my own and deal with all kinds of behaviour, from the start of the day right until the end. My feedback from my tutor and class teacher was all positive and they guided me in the right direction for improvements, alternative ways and next steps.
I was lucky to have a supportive school through my placement, which really helped me improve my teachings. I feel next time I teach I will have a much more vast knowledge on how teaching works and how to teach as this experience taught me so much for my first year of university.
My action plan for my next placement is to use all the knowledge i collected from this placement and build upon it to make my knowledge even deeper and greater.
Nursery Assistant
During the summer after my first year of university had finished I become a nursery assistant for the summer. This was a great opportunity for me as it enabled me to carry on my knowledge from my first year placement into the nursery environment. I was responsible for children from the age of 2 to the age of 5. I got a sense of what it is like to work with the youngest children of the school system and learn what roles and duties it entails. These included; teaching, reading, preparing snack and lunch, doing creative activities, being responsible for outside play, toileting, cleaning and assessing children’s progress.
I had good experience in teaching the age 4/5 there alphabet and linking this to physical activities in the nursery room, e.g. find something beginning with E. I also had a good experience in teaching manners at meal times.
I decided form this experience that I prefer to work with older children had they have more prior understanding and knowledge which aids teaching. Whereas in the nursery it is a lot of play and less teaching. I feel I could have been more involved with the teaching aspect of the job as that is what I was studying at university. If I got this opportunity again I would ask to do more teaching along side the other assistants.
In Peter’s workshop today we learnt about waves and vibrations. So what is a vibration? Where do you come across vibrations? And what happens during a vibration?
A vibration is the forward and backward motion of an object in a regular pattern. Vibrations can be so fast that you cannot see them. Vibrations start of big and become smaller and smaller unless energy is provided to keep the waves big. These vibration make sound occur.
Vibrations are detected by the ear. Once the sound travel to our ear, our ear drum vibrates and these vibrations are passed through the three small bones (called ossicles) to a spiral structure called the cochlea. Signals are passed from the cochlea to the brain through the auditory nerve, and our brain interprets these signals as sound.
We come across vibrations in every day life. A major vibration you would find it to communicate without is your vocal cords! Your vocal cord vibrate when you speak to make sound. In school when you ping a ruler or elastic band over an object you can often see the vibrations, the waves going backwards and forwards. If you go to a music festival and stand beside the huge loud speakers you can see and hear the bass vibrating the speaker. You can see and hear vibrations when they are at low frequencies.
Sound travels outwards in oscillations (backwards and forwards motion), in all directions, from the equilibrium point. The air around the equilibrium point creates the sound waves. Sound travels in longitudinal waves. Waves are made up of compressions and rarefactions. Compression happens when molecules are forced, or pressed, together. Rarefaction is just the opposite, it occurs when molecules are given extra space and allowed to expand.
Sounds waves need a medium to travel through, they will travel in a gas, liquid or solid – not empty space. The vibrations shake up the particles around them and these particle create a domino effect for the sound the travel. You can experiment with these three forms by making string telephones, talking underwater and putting a drinking glass to a wall.
To make something louder you need to add more energy to it, the term amplitude can be used to refer to loudness. Amplitude is the maximum height of the wave from its resting position – the greater the amplitude, the louder the sound. Pitch is to do with the frequency or number of vibrations per second. Frequency is measured in hertz (Hz). The closer together the waves are and the higher the pitch. On a guitar sting, the shorter the sting the higher the pitch will be as the vibration have less material to cover therefore the pattern of oscillations is more regular.
At the end of Peter’s workshop we got to experiment with vibrations and Beth, Beth and I experimented with music.
This question was asked during our Discovering Mathematics lecture and created quite a debate/discussion on the subject of can animals really count, the same way as humans, or are they learning to ‘count’ in a different way? Before the lecture continued past the question I gave my opinion that animals can’t count like a humans can but perhaps an animals owner can teach the animal to recognise the shape of a number or teach it a command which represents a certain number. So the animal doesn’t actually understand the concept of a number but rather a command.
As we went through several animals and their abilities to seemingly count I was still stuck to my initial opinion. The first animal we looked at was a horse called ‘Clever Hans’, who could apparently count using hoof stomps to signal a number. Yet we examined this example closer to conclude that the horse was just understanding that a command from his master that meant to start stomping his hoof. The horse didn’t understand “what’s 2 + 3?” but rather the action the master did with their hand which singled to the horse to start and stop stomping his hoof when the horse got the the correct number.
Clever Hans’s understanding is similar to how a dog learns commands. A dog associates the word “roll over” the the physical action of rolling over. The same with Hans associated a movement from his master with the physical tapping of his hoof.
We looked at lions, ants, bees, robbins, chicks and chimpanzees too. Ants made me question my opinion on if animals can count a little bit. Ants are clever animals as they know exactly how many steps it takes them to get them to their nests. An experiment was done to test their mathematic ability. the first test was to see if the ants would stop short of their nest if a few of their legs were chopped off. The hypothesis was correct, they did indeed stop short. The second test was to see if the ants would go beyond their nest if match stick were to be added/stuck onto their legs. Again the hypothesis was right, the ants carried on past their nests. Scientist put this down to ants “internal pedometers”. The ants could travel back and forth in the dark or blindfolded and they would still make it in exact steps back to their nests (Carey, 2006). Did this change my overall opinion? Not yet.
We finally came onto the most convincing of all examples. The chimpanzees. In particular Ayumu the chimpanzee. We watched a video of the chimpanzee managing to tap the numbers 1-9 in the right order. Now my initial thought was “oh the chimp was simply just learned the look of each number as a symbol and has been taught their order”. But then the video clip continued to show that the chimp can still order the number 1-9 when the numbers only flash up for less than a second, then covered up, and still manages to remember the order they were in. Our class tried this and we definitely didn’t do as well as the chimp did. The video then also showed the chimp doing the same thing but this time there was gaps where numbers were missing…So does the chimp really know how to count or does it simply have a very good memory and has been taught forcefully to remember the order, even with gaps?
Ultimately, I was almost convinced. Trust me I was close to believing it. But I still don’t think that animals see numbers and understand them the same way we do. There’re so many arguments to say they can or can’t. If only they spoke english and we could ask them, then we would know for sure.
To make something louder you need to add more energy to it, the term amplitude can be used to refer to loudness. Amplitude is the maximum height of the wave from its resting position – the greater the amplitude, the louder the sound. Pitch is to do with the frequency or number of vibrations per second. Frequency is measured in hertz (Hz). The closer together the waves are and the higher the pitch. On a guitar sting, the shorter the sting the higher the pitch will be as the vibration have less material to cover therefore the pattern of oscillations is more regular.
