Tag Archives: Maths

Week 5

Monday

As part of a community event, CE2, CM1 and CM2 participated in a race on the grounds of the local sports centre. Each year group had different time slots and competed against other students their age from neighbouring schools. The class I was accompanying, CE2, had their slot at 9:30 or 9:50 depending on which colour category they fell into. In preparation for the race, each class had been participating in practice runs in the school grounds under the coaching of their teachers. The CE2’s, for example, would have to run 1500m on the day, and so the teacher had them practice running this distance in the school grounds so they could work on the time it took them to finish. The practice sessions in school provided many teaching opportunities, a few in particular that I witnessed included: the importance of warming up the body before running and the importance of pace and stamina when running longer distances.

In the days leading up to the race, the children began to record their final times, which were then used to determine whether they would run as a yellow, a blue or a red. When we arrived that the location of the race, the children were directed around the course by the organiser of the event so that they were aware of the course and its boundaries. They then proceeded to pin their running badge identifying their name, school and colour to their shirts in preparation for the race. The yellow group were first to run then the red and blue group.

The whole experience was really good for me. I got to learn more about the responsibilities of a teacher as I was tasked with stopping the traffic to allow the children to cross the road, then later, I was asked to watch over the group who was not running at the time to make sure none of them wandered off etc. These are quite large responsibilities and I was happy to be given these opportunities by the teacher. It was also nice to see how passionate the children were about the race and to see the progress they had made over the past 4 weeks I had been with them.

Tuesday

Today, I asked the CP/CE1 teacher if I could join her in her class today, as I felt that I had been spending a lot of time over the past few weeks in the upper half of the school and I had not observed the earlier stages since the first week, or had the opportunity to teach them yet.

After spending the morning observing French and Maths, I began to recognise some of the differences between the priorities of the teachers at each stage. Particularly in French, this teacher focused a large portion of the time on sounds and phonetics as opposed to grammar, which is heavily pursued in the upper stages. This is quite similar to the norm in Scotland, as, children require a solid foundation in spoken language before moving on to written language.

The teacher explained to me that often children find it difficult to learn to read French, (recent literacy scores) because there is sometimes several ways to write one phonetic sound. For example, “an” and “en” when used in words both sound the same. For this reason, the teacher tends to avoid giving her CPs in the class any texts to read until they are stronger with their phonics. Even the CE1s in the class find reading and writing quite difficult and it is a recurring theme that I have witnessed throughout the school. This perhaps explains why French is given such a large portion of the school curriculum.

In the afternoon, the teacher taught a Maths lesson on right angles where the children had to complete drawing exercises in their workbooks using certain equipment, such as a ruler or a square. The teacher asked me if I could help them with these exercises as they struggle to use the equipment properly. I was able to help some of the children by showing them how to hold the square properly to check for right angles or how to hold the ruler so that their drawings had straight lines. I also explained to one child how all the sides of a square are equal, which prompted her to correct one of her answers. It was nice to have the opportunity to help the children in something other than English and it highlighted to me how Maths is a subject that is universal as I was able to use my knowledge to help these children despite knowing very little French because I could understand the work through the use of shapes and numbers.

After the short break in the afternoon, I was then asked to lead an English lesson on the topic of family. First of all, the teacher had the children sing some English songs that they had learnt to me. The songs were short and catchy, but more importantly, they were repetitive and so the children knew the words very well because they were continually repeating them. The teacher explained to me that because the children are young, she does not let them see the written lyrics before they the words completely off by heart as this can confuse their pronunciation of the words. I like the use of songs for teaching language because they are interactive and engaging for the children. As a teacher of younger pupils, she strongly advocates making language learning a fun experience by using songs, games and stories to teach vocabulary.

For this lesson, the teacher already had a rough plan for the execution and so she provided me with the resources I needed, which included flashcards on family and the bears book, and she also suggested a few games I could play with the flashcards. Out of her suggestions, I decided to play “Tic Tac Toe” with them, where I split the class in half and had them compete against each other as noughts and crosses. The competitive element turned out to be quite successful as the children were focused and engaged in the game because they wanted their team to win. Before beginning the game, I spent a couple of minutes simply revising the different cards by showing the children the picture and asking them what it was. Once the game had started, I invited up team captains to the board to act on behave of their team and listen to which card they wanted them to choose. This helped me see if they understood which card corresponded to the chosen family member.

Afterwards, I read the English storybook the teacher had given me on the three bears. As I was reading the story, I was aware that the children would not fully understand every word, but, like how I have been learning French over the past 4 weeks, they were able to use the context of the pictures to aid their understanding. This is why I would emphasise to them each picture, as well as mimicking the voices of the characters in the book to indicate certain descriptive aspects of their character, such as age and gender.

Overall, today has given me a lot of ideas to consider for when I teach a foreign language in Scotland for future lessons as I can use a lot of what I have learnt. The ideas will be particularly useful for my early years placement next year, and one idea that I really liked was reading a storybook in a foreign language. Therefore, before I leave France, I plan to buy a storybook written in French, which I can use to teach French in the future.

Wednesday

On Wednesdays, I do not often see English being taught at the school because it is only a half day and the teachers like to make sure the focus is on French and Maths in this shorter time frame. This morning, in the CE2 class, the time was roughly split in half between both subjects, making each session about an hour and 20 minutes long. In my opinion, this is quite a long time to focus on just one subject; however, the children today practiced several elements of each subject during this time. In French, they spent a short amount of time writing imaginatively before moving onto reading a text, then finally, deconstructing this text in an effort to improve their spelling and grammar. In Maths, it was similar; the children began with some mental maths, before moving onto written algorithms and finishing with a problem solving worksheet, all of which incorporated addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

Thursday

Traces by Florence Hinckel

In preparation for a famous author visiting, the CM2s spent much of today working on their class project. As a class, they have been reading a science fiction novel called, “Traces”, written by Florence Hinckel, which is the story of a young boy who is blamed for a crime that has not yet happened by a computer programme designed to identify future criminals. The class have been working on this novel for several weeks, beginning by reading each chapter and then identifying the key moments of those chapters. Now, the teacher has had them reproduce the book themselves in the form of a comic.

I have observed that an A4 sheet of paper represents each chapter, and so, as a class, they would have practiced their summarising and prioritising skills, as well as practising elements of language throughout, such as speech. Another aspect of the comic is the illustrations to represent the scenes and characters, which is another great teaching point in language about different texts. This type of project is therefore a very well rounded example of the children’s literacy skills.

Friday

In the morning, I taught the CE2 class the parts of the body in English. I began the lesson with a quick warm up activity about the weather, as it was the beginning of the day. I then moved onto the parts of the body. I had been asked to do this lesson in advance by the teacher and so she had provided me with the resources she wanted me to use. She informed me that the children had been introduced to the parts of the body yesterday and had a reference sheet already glued into their jotters. So, today, she wanted me to complete a crossword activity with them where they would use this knowledge.

I began by using the PowerPoint she provided me, which had the different parts of the body on it. I would ask the children, “what is this?” for each picture and then pick a child with their hand up to tell me the answer. After eachpicture had been identified, I had the children repeat the name of the body part after me. Once we had completed all the body parts, I asked the children to stand up and follow my instructions in a similar fashion to “Simon Says”. I then proceeded to ask the class to touch different body parts on themselves, for example, “Can you touch your arm?” As they had just began looking at the English for body parts, they found this a bit more difficult cause there was no picture to help them, and so, after asking each question, I would demonstrate the action as well to ensure they understood.

Next, I moved onto the crossword activity and allowed the class around 5 to 10 minutes to complete it on their own, after I had explained the task using a mixture of French and English. As they were completing the activity, I made my way around the classroom to observe their progress and ended up helping a few children. One child, in particular, was rather confused between the hand and the finger. Helping the child was a bit more difficult as I had to use more French than I am confident in, but I was able to establish that he understood what the body part was in French and so I directed him to his previous sheet of the body to help him realise his mistake.

I concluded the lesson by going over the sheet with the whole class on the whiteboard and filling in the correct answers for them. Most of the children seemed to be getting most if not all the answers correct, which was a good indicator that they understood the vocabulary well. The next step for them would be more revision and repetition of the new vocabulary so that, eventually, they are not relying on worksheets and wall displays to help them remember.

In the afternoon, I continued to teach a different class about school in Scotland. The class I was teaching was the CP/CE1 class that I had done family with earlier in the week, though this was my first time teaching this class my own content and so I had to adapt my resources for their age and stage (see Appendix 1). The teacher had already told me that she aims for shorter lessons that are less content heavy when she teaches English because they are young. I, therefore, took this comment from her into account when planning for today and decided that I should just focus on one aspect of School in Scotland, the school uniform. I also took some inspiration from the resources I was given and the lesson that I did on Tuesday by producing my own flashcards of the vocabulary for this topic.

When teaching the lesson, I approached it in a similar way to before by using my PowerPoint I had produced to go through each item of clothing, explaining what it is and asking the children to repeat the word after me. After the children had repeated the vocabulary several times and I was happy with their progress, I decided to do something similar to the activity I did this morning. I asked the children, “raise your hand if you are wearing…?” This was quite ambitious considering the difficulty I had faced executing this task this morning, however, I felt as though the lesson required something more interactive and I have observed over the past week that this class is very good at picking up new content fast. The task was met with some difficulty, especially for the CPs, however, the repetitive nature of the activity meant that the children began to catch on towards the end.

School Uniform Flashcards

I then decided to conclude the session with a game using the clothing flashcards I had made. It was a memory game that the teacher had suggested to me as she had used it before, where the children would turn over two of the overturned flashcards on the whiteboard at a time in an attempt to find a pair of a word and its picture. The game was much easier to explain because the children had a prior knowledge of the format and aim of the game, however, one thing they did struggle with was if they turned over a card with a word on it rather than a picture, they struggled to the read the word despite having a knowledge of the word and not struggling to identify the item of clothing if it was a card with a picture. This highlighted to me how much easier the children do find listening and talking inEnglish as opposed to reading and writing, as they knew all the names of the clothing, but because of their age, they lacked the skills and confidence to read English.

Though, overall, the lesson worked well, the children were engaged and I was confident that they had understood and took on board the new vocabulary I had introduced to them. Now, they just have to continually practice saying these words on a regular basis. I have plans to go back to the class next week fora follow up lesson, where I will revisit the vocabulary and play another game with them. This teacherwas particularly good at giving me feedback as she suggested to me that next time I could perhaps spend even more time simply practicing the vocabulary before moving onto the games. I plan to take this feedback on board and play 

 

Hippo Has A Hat by Julia Donaldson and Nick Sharratt

around with the vocabulary more as a whole class using the larger pictures on the PowerPoint. She also gave me an English book she had on clothing to look at over the weekend, which was very helpful.

 

 

I feel that this week, having the opportunity to teach two lessons in one day has been great for improving my organisational skills, which were what I identified at the beginning of placement as something that I wanted to gain more of. Having the opportunity to produce and use my own resources is also aiding these skills as producing these resources requires a lot of thought and preparation in advance.

Appendix 1 – School Uniform

Week 4

Tuesday

This week, Tuesday was the first day of the school week as yesterday was a public holiday for Easter Monday. I spent the day in the CE2/CM1 class, where I observed lessons in French, Maths and History. For French, they had to do dictation exercise, which I have noticed is quite common in France for teaching grammar and language rules.

As I was observing the Maths lesson, I noticed that the teacher was teaching two different lessons using two separate whiteboards to a class split completely down the middle. I assume that this was due to the two different age groups present in the classroom, however, this is the first sign of differentiated learning I have seen in this school. As I observed the lesson, I noticed that there were a few pupils struggling to keep up with the pace of the lesson and a few racing ahead in their understanding.

When the lesson had finished, I asked the teacher about something I had noticed on the board: letters on the corner of each board resembling initials. She informed me that this told the children what jotter they should be using to do their work; for example, the board had the letters “CB” on it, which stands for Cahier de Brouillon. When I looked up the English for this in my dictionary, I discovered that it meant, “rough workbook/jotter”, and so this specific jotter, which I have seen before in other classrooms is used for different subjects, such as Maths or French, and it encourages the children to show how they have worked something out without constricting them to be neat and tidy.

After lunch, I witnessed a good example of behaviour management from the teacher following an incident in the playground. Although I was not fully able to understand what the incident entailed, I did understand how the teacher dealt with the issue, as she used similar protocol I had read about in theory. First, she heard the story of what had happened from one child’s perspective and then again but from another child’s perspective. The technique used by the teacher here could be categorised as conflict mediation, where the teacher, as a third party, guides the two children in conflict towards a resolution. Gartrell (2013, p351) describes the teacher’s role, as, “making sure both parties are equal contributors to a peaceful settlement”, which, in this instance, she did by allowing each child an equal opportunity to voice their opinion. Through this, the classroom atmosphere feels more democratic and fair for all, which is a key value I have witnessed throughout this school.

Wednesday

As part of a community initiative, the police visited the school today to teach some of the older pupils how to ride a bike safely in the street. Their safety course included breaking responsively, using their arms to signal which direction they wanted to turn and weaving the bike in and out of the cones. Not only does this opportunity highlight the place of the school as a member of the wider “La Chapelle St Mesmin” community, it also highlights a clear cultural difference between France and Scotland. In Scotland, children are often spoken to by the emergency services about issues of public safety, such as crossing the road or the dangers of fire, but learning to ride a bike safely is not something that is consolidated upon in school.

Thursday

Today, I was given the opportunity to do a follow up lesson with CE2 about School in Scotland. Last time, I did not have the opportunity to hand out my worksheets to the children and so this time we filled them out together. I thought this way of doing it was better than giving them the sheets first time round as it meant that more attention could be put to completing the sheets properly. Plus, it was good from an assessment perspective to see how much the children had remembered from the previous lesson, which was quite a lot. I began with the timetable sheet, which I mirrored on the whiteboard using the answers provided to me by the children.

Next, I moved onto the school uniform sheet and went through the vocabulary for this again through asking, “what is this?” then receiving an answer and finally asking the children to repeat the word after me to practice the correct pronunciation. As this sheet was more of a revision sheet than a worksheet, I tasked the children with working in pairs to test each other on the vocabulary, where one showed the other a picture of the clothing and the other had to successfully name that piece of clothing without looking at the caption. Throughout this, I walked around the classroom and encouraged them to use their whiteboards to try and write down their answers. As I was making my way around the classroom, I noticed one girl was sitting alone and did not have a partner for the task so I became her partner and tested her on the items of clothing. This highlighted to me how important it is to continually observe your class throughout the lesson, as, if I had stayed at the front of the class I would have missed this, as well as not being able to hear what was being said by the children in case it was wrong.

Friday

Today, I had another opportunity to accompany the CE2 class on a school trip. This time, they were going to a cinema to see a series of short animation films by one director. The cinema that we visited is called, “Cinema Les Carmes” and is situated in the centre of Orléans, so we had to take a tram to get there. Taking the tram was a new experience for me and I found it interesting how the school used public transport when they were going places, the whole experience felt very relaxed and the teacher did not seem phased by taking such a large group of children out of the school to use public transport. The teacher explained to me that the cinema we were going to often hosted events like this one exclusively for school children and many of the films they show have an educational element to them. This is a great resource for the school to have and film and theatre seems to be a large part of the school’s culture as they classes often visit film screenings and plays.

Accompanying us on the trip was a parent of one of the pupils, who was very friendly and took an interest in my role in the school and why I was there. It was great to have this opportunity to speak with another adult and gain more of an insight into the class from her perspective, as she has known many of the children from a young age. I was also grateful that she was so accepting of my presence as I have been worried about how I am perceived by the parents because I don’t speak a lot of French, but I could tell she appreciated my attempts to communicate with her.

Reference

Gartrell, D.  (2013) A Guidance Approach for the Encouraging Classroom.  Boston: Cengage Learning.

Week 1

Tuesday

When I first arrived at my school, école Bel-Air, I was greeted by the “directeur”, who is the equivalent of the Scottish head-teacher. She informed me that for the first week I would be given the opportunity to observe in different classrooms at different levels. The first classroom I visited was “cours préparatoire” or “CP”, which is the equivalent of Primary 1 in Scotland, where the children were 6 years old. The CP classroom was very different from what I expected and very different from an early years classroom in Scotland.

The layout of the classroom was very basic as the children sat in pairs and had their own individual desks that faced the front. I think this is helpful for the children as their desks have a shelf underneath (see images below) containing all their books, jotters and writing materials, which created the sense of an individualised place they are responsible for. Also, the children hardly ever had to leave their desks to retrieve anything as all the resources they needed were in front of them. From an organisational point of view, this is a good set up as it helps to make transitioning periods much smoother. However, as I observed throughout the day, this layout does not facilitate effective paired and group discussions, something which is valued and encouraged in the Scottish classroom, but is lacking here.

A view of a desk, which seats an individual child.

View of the shelf under the desk containing a child’s resources.

Also apparent was the lack of shared spaces in the classroom; the only area present was the library, though this was not set up in a way which encouraged children to go and read, it was merely a display of the books on offer. In Scotland, a lot of emphasis is placed upon play and experience to facilitate learning, but in French classrooms there are no areas for explorative play, no toys present and no carpet area for soft play. The classrooms in this particular school are quite limited for space and I feel as though teachers in Scotland work harder to ensure they are maximising their space and designing their classrooms to fit the contours of the room.

Wednesday

The structure of the school day is very different from the school day in Scotland and this is largely due to the cultural differences between these two countries. For example, the school day is much longer, beginning at half past 8 and ending at half past 4. These longer days mean that the children receive two 15-minute long breaks, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, then lunch, which lasts two hours, beginning at 11:30. In France, Lunch is a very important part of the day, with French sociologist Thibaut de Saint Pol (cited in Ditton, 2016), describing lunch as “an important social time” and “family identity, work teams or friends are built around these moments”. This is a concept that I am struggling to become accustomed to as, in Scotland, lunch is very much viewed as a refuelling step between breakfast and lunch and so, we eat fast and with convenience. As a result, lunch for me feels very long and causes the day to drag. However, one aspect of the French school day I actually prefer is that Wednesdays are a half-day and school finishes at 11:30, the first time I experienced this, which made the lessons that morning more concise. I thought finishing early midweek broke up the week nicely and it was nice to have time after school to be able to do things.

Today was also my first opportunity to talk to the children about themselves and their work. I did find this difficult to do, as my current level of French is quite minimal and vice versa with the children and their level of English. However, I managed to pick out key words and phrases to respond to some of their questions and the children were also very imaginative in their ways of communicating with me, as they drew pictures or pointed at books to express to me what they meant. One thing I loved seeing was the children’s clear curiosity for language, as they were showing me pictures from books and asking me to say what they were in English. By the end of the day, they were attempting to use English to communicate with me. This love of language is something that, as I teacher, I want to foster in my future classroom by introducing foreign languages early on and partnering them with social or picture cues to excite the children.

Thursday

Today, I observed and aided in an English lesson given to the CM1/CM2 class. At the beginning of the day, the children were given the instruction to ask me questions in English. These questions ranged from “What is your name?” and “How old are you?” to “What is your favourite movie?” and “Where do you live?” I knew that what was important was that the children were hearing how I pronounced specific words, and so I made sure to repeat the stem of their question in my answer, for example, if I was asked, “What is your favourite colour?” I would answer, “My favourite colour is…”. This will also help the children to form sentences rather than one-word answers, which was something that the teacher was keen for them to do.

One thing that is very different about teaching a foreign language in France than in Scotland is that in France, the teacher tries to conduct the whole lesson in that foreign language, i.e. English, therefore the instructions are in English as well as the disciplining. I found this was a good way to teach the children as they were fully immersed in the language and they seemed able to follow and understand what the teacher had said with minimal clarification. As instructions are often common phrases in many lessons, the children are constantly exposed to these phrases and the repetition will continually improve their overall understanding. Another important aspect of learning a language is relying on context, which I have found has improved my French over this week.

Most of their lessons throughout the day were very short sessions of French language/literature and Mathematics. I found out today that a large portion of the timetable consists of French and Maths, as children receive French lessons twice a day, a total of 10 hours per week, and they study Maths at least once a day, totalling of 5 hours a week. Other aspects of the school curriculum include a lot of focus on English and Sports. This particular school provides a variety of opportunities for the children to take part in sports taught by specialised instructors, as I accompanied the CP/CM1 class today to the local swimming pool for a swimming lesson.

Another interesting aspect of observation I did today was looking through the different jotters of the pupils. They had several jotters for different subjects; however, one jotter that peaked my interest was a jotter entitled, “Discovering the World”. The jotter was divided into five sections (see picture below), and seemed to equate with Environmental Studies/Social Subjects, which we teach in Scotland, as well as incorporating elements of Maths and Science. The last section, “vivre ensemble”, presented work done on society and ethics, which was the first example I had seen of Religious Education’s replacement in the French curriculum. 

Contents page of the jotter, “Discovering the World”.

An example of work on the French Presidential Elections.

Friday

 As Friday was St Patrick’s Day, I observed the teacher of the CM1/CM2 class teach a lesson on the day and it’s history. The teacher provided a worksheet for the pupils to read, which had passages of text in both French and English. The teacher asked me to read out the English for the children so that they could listen to my pronunciation. She then picked out some of the key vocabulary from the text to form a list in their jotters for future reference. This teacher informed me that because these children are the stage before high school, the teachers at the high school had requested that the children gain more experience of reading and writing in English. This highlighted to me that the rate of progression expected in children learning a foreign language in France is very fast, as when children first begin school, a lot of emphasis is placed on hearing the words not reading the words.

Before this lesson, I hadn’t really witnessed a lot of learning outside of French and Maths, and so this lesson began to feel more similar to the style of teaching practiced in Scotland, specifically the cross-curricular potential, which the teacher fully exploited. Throughout the lesson, the pupils were receiving an immersive experience regarding St Patrick’s Day; they were looking at pictures and they were watching videos, whilst also reading and listening to text in both French and English.

After lunch, I then visited the CE1/CE2 class. This class has two teachers, one of whom is also the head-teacher of the school. With this class, I visited the local sports centre, where they were learning how to fence. To get to the sports centre, we took a short bus journey, which gave me the opportunity to speak with some of the children, mostly them wanting to practice their English on me.

Overall, I have observed a large majority of the classes in the school during this first week and although I would have liked to have observed a bit more English and have been more involved in the lessons, I am hoping that this is something that will happen over the coming weeks.

References

Ditton, H. (2016)  ‘Why do the French take such long lunch breaks?’, The Local (France edn), 28 April.  Available at: https://www.thelocal.fr/20160428/why-do-the-french-take-such-long-lunch-breaks  (Accessed: 14 March 2018).