Category Archives: 3.1 Teaching & Learning

First day of #UoDTransitionEY

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Last Wednesday marked my first day going into a nursery placement. During this year at the University of Dundee I and a 7 other training teachers have been given the opportunity to go out into a nursery setting in Dundee prior to our formal placement this coming March. This is for a research project proposed by 3 of my tutors. We will be going into our nursery placement one afternoon a week for 8 weeks.

This opportunity is to help me develop my skills as a practitioner by improving my communication skills through play with the young children and adults at my placement. I am also looking forward to developing my confidence working with this age range as I have had little experience in this area. I was lucky enough to work with Kindergarten children last March on my second year placement in Abu Dhabi and in a year one class during maths in Paris. However, I have never worked in a Scottish nursery setting and it will be interesting to develop my prior knowledge through this opportunity.

I was a little bit nervous heading out to my placement last Wednesday and of course ended up arriving way to early so I went for a little walk around the area before heading into the nursery. I was immediately welcomed by all the staff and given a small tour of the nursery. On first impressions the nursery space is lovely, there are lots of open areas for the children to play in with everything being (apart from door handles to the adult areas) at their height.

Upon arrival the children are able to play until they go to group time which is a quick register and then giving them a choice of activity that they would like to do today (although they aren’t restricted to this one activity all afternoon). They then go to their area and allowed to play completely at their leisure, the outdoor play area I was told is always open to the children and they are able to come and go as they please.

When we went into the free play part of the afternoon I did feel a little uneasy as I have always been in settings where there was more emphasis on a set structure. Even in my time in kindergarten the children were allowed to play wherever they wanted but they had set areas set up and everything was tied into something that they were learning that week (I learnt a lot about ants very quickly there). So to start with I wandered around the nursery not wanting to disturb anyones play, 5 seconds later I was then asked to read “Three Billy Goats Gruff”, my brain immediately went back to my lectures last year about reading in the early years and to the discussions we have had about reading to children in the ESW Book Club. I hope I did a good job!

I then seemed to spend the rest of my time outside doing a variety of things, mainly looking for bugs which was really great. The children were so fascinated to look under all the logs and into the nooks and crannies of the nursery. They got a bug jar to collect the beasties that they caught and investigate them further, once they were finished they gently released them back into the garden.

It was a fantastic first day at placement and since then I have been reflecting on my time there and coming up with questions and areas that I wish to explore further within my own practice. The main area I wish to look at is questioning, throughout the day I was speaking to one of the practitioners about the importance of extending the children’s learning through discussion. I really want to develop my skills at this as although I try and use “Bloom’s Taxonomy” and higher order questioning I am not confident at it. I also want to explore the structure of the day with the practitioners as I am interested seeing how they allow the children to explore a specific topic. But also how they allow the children to experience a range of things, as the children pick what they want to do what stops them from choosing the same thing over and over again?

I am thoroughly looking forward to going back after the October holidays.

An update on my educational philosophy…

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We have been encouraged to develop our own education philosophy when beginning this course. At this point in the academic year we are about to go on our Learning from Life placement, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to reflect upon my own educational philosophy and how this has developed over the year.

Last year my educational philosophy agreed strongly with John Dewey’s suggestion that education is a social process. I feel schools provide should provide a broad holistic education to children, going well beyond what can be found in a textbook. I feel that this development in education is as important as the facts and figures which they might learn in a classroom as it provides them with social skills which they can use for years after they leave school. Additionally, I believe that education should be child centred, this is an aspect included in Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), as through the Experience and Outcomes document lessons can be developed to the classes individual needs and so enabling personalisation and choice (Scottish Government, 2008, P26). This option can ultimately develop children’s love for education as they are learning something which is relevant to them and that they are passionate about.

Throughout this year we have looked at a variety of aspects within the curriculum and education system. Through looking into Languages, Maths and Science curricular areas to the history of education and differing curriculums across the world, I feel that teaching is less about dictating facts to a room full of silent children, as it was in the past, and instead it should be more about giving children the opportunity to explore and develop their own learning in a safe and supportive environment. I feel that this allows for more meaningful learning as the children can feel proud of discovering something for themselves and through communication with their peers about it, consolidation of this learning is achieved. This is an idea which is being further explored within Upstart, a campaign to change the starting age of children in formal education from 5 to 7 and instead allow children a greater opportunity to explore the world through play. You can see further reasons for this change on their website at: http://www.upstart.scot/reasons/.

At the same time, we have just completed an interagency module about the importance of working with other professionals and methods which can enhance this but also hinder it. This has developed my educational philosophy as I have seen how important it is to a childs education and welfare when all professionals are working together to achieve the same goal. This has encouraged me to strive for this within my own practice as through this collaborative practice every child can receive the support necessary for them to achieve their full potential. This is an important aspect to think about when looking at inclusion within the classroom, as multi-agency support can help children in a variety of manners. I am interested in furthering my understanding of how to develop this inclusive practice.

For my learning for life placement, I am going to Abu Dhabi and working with a learning support team in a school which follows the American Curriculum. It will be interesting to see how these ideas are reflected through the American Curriculum and especially how they create inclusion of all students.

Copyright: http://www.gulenmovement.us/fethullah-gulens-educational-philosophy-in-action.html

Copyright: http://www.gulenmovement.us/fethullah-gulens-educational-philosophy-in-action.html

 

¡Hablando y escuchando en una clase de lengua moderna!

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Copy right of Education Scotland http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/resources/0to9/a1plus2approachtolanguagelearning/introduction.asp

Modern language teaching has become a very important aspect of education today. This is particularly seen in the Curriculum for Excellence’s 1+2 approach to modern language teaching in todays classrooms. This approach allows for schools to teach a variety of languages from German and Spanish to Chinese and Gaelic, depending on their resources and teacher availability.

I feel this is a great opportunity for teaching children an additional language at a young age. Although like anything there are potential problems with any scheme. Some of these problems occur through the variety of schools, through size and location, which Scotland has. For example, as highlighted in the video below, one school in the centre of Edinburgh had one teacher who could come into school to provide one hour a week of language teaching whereas in the rural school in Aberdeen the teacher was able to manipulate her timetable as she wished to provide more hours of languages.

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Screen shot of the video http://my.dundee.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/pid-4364503-dt-content-rid-2420553_2/xid-2420553_2

http://my.dundee.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/pid-4364503-dt-content-rid-2420553_2/xid-2420553_2 

Throughout my personal education I haven grown to love languages and can not wait to be able to pass on this passion to my pupils. I was first introduced to foreign languages in primary school however I did not particularly enjoy the teaching methods of my teacher and in fact she made me quite scared to try and speak in the foreign language. This has influenced me to not create this similar environment in my own classroom and instead foster an atmosphere which encourages pupils to enjoy their learning of a foreign language.

Last week we had our first input in modern language teaching, I specifically went to the Spanish input, where we discussed methods of enhancing talking and listening skills in the classroom. This was supported through my reading of Teaching Foreign Languages in the Primary School by Kirsch (2008). This reading supported the input through the methods we can use to create a confidence in our learners to speak and listen in a foreign language. The main methods we discussed were presenting, practising, drilling and finally producing the target language.

One of the main aspects that I took away from this input was that a teacher should not introduced the visual word to the pupils until they are able to confidently reproduce this word. This is because when the pupils see the word for the first time they try and apply British pronunciation of the sounds to the word.

Finally, through my reading and the discussions in the input I have learnt ways to present the target language, but also to allow the pupils to practice it in confidence. This will help the pupils to build their confidence of using the target language pronunciation methods as if they make a mistake they are the only ones who know. Some of these methods are using a puppet or introducing the vocabulary through a familiar story or song.

From this experience I am looking forward to further inputs on modern languages.

References:

http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/images/LearningInTwoPlusLanguages_tcm4-306089.pdf 

Kirsch, C, (2008), Teaching Foreign Languages in the Primary School, London, Continuum International Pub

Stuck on the fruit machine…

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Copyright of Code Club UK

Copyright of Code Club UK

*This was a post I created in my old blog last year*

Last week we went back to Code Club at Glebelands Primary School. We unfortunately did not manage to go the week before, so when we arrived we learned that many of the pupils had progressed to the next stage of coding. Previously they had made games about the main characters of Code club and produced their own fireworks displays, this time they were attempting to create their own fruit machine game. Each of these areas are a different level in Code Club thus teaching the children the basics while steadily increasing the challenge level and this time it was certainly challenging. This increasing aspect of the activity continuously engages the pupils as they want to solve the challenge. Over the last few weeks we have been learning about self-esteem in children, we looked at the different aspects of high and low self-esteem and the effects it has on pupils. Within this class I feel that the pupils have a healthy level of self-esteem this is because they are focused on their growth and improvement of coding and happy enough to make a mistake, I feel this is because of the way Code Club is set out and how it teaches children to know that mistakes are ok and how to rectify them.

The children were quite happy getting on with this activity at the beginning until they came to stage 3!! This stage wanted them to stop and start the ‘sprites’ (a technical word for characters) when you clicked on them. Code club has a set of instruction that the children follow therefore, normally when they are stuck, the pupil or you just go back through the instruction in case they have missed anything. Thus teaching children to problem solve and improving their literacy skills by following the instructions carefully. However this time this method did not work. I sat with one pupil for whole the hour trying to figure out what was wrong and as the rest of the class arrived at the same stage we were all stuck by the end of the activity. We stayed behind after the kids had left to try and figure out this problem. This helped develop my teaching experience for when a lesson plan or activity does not go the way I had planned and so have a back up option available. Unluckily we were unable to fix this problem on this particular day, however when my fellow students returned the next week they managed to fix this by locating the action code required which we could not find before. Such a simple fix for a very big problem! However we have now hit another wall – challenge 7!

Unfortunately we will have to tackle this one after the Christmas holidays.