Monthly Archives: January 2018

Health and Wellbeing

UoDEdushare

The key messages from Dr Suzanne Zeedyk and John Carnochan’s videos both focus on how important it is for brains to develop from such a young age. The brain development in the first 3 years of a child is essential to ensure each child grows relationships with the people around them and know which way to response to them.  It is important as teachers to consider the excitement or on the flip side, worry, of early year brain pathway as it defines the way our brain will function in adulthood. Such as a child who is being put in a situation to witness domestic violence within their household, the child;s brains is having to learn how to cope with threatening behavior, which means they are unable  to learn in any other way. This can lead to children having high levels of stress hormones such as Cortisol as they are having to learn to adapt to the environment they are living in. A stressful home life can influence the children in many negative ways such as poor development of life skills, relationships and can have a large impact on inequality.  As teachers, it may be difficult for us to have that 1 to 1 strong bond with children if they have not built any close relationships with family in their early years. By having a lack of engaging contact and spending quality time with parents, this can have a negative impact on the children when they begin to enter the classroom for the first time. To ensure good brain development it is essential that to at least the age of 3, the child has some relationship with an adult, which may just be simple as smiling to the child. By ensuring this, it means there will be consistent good links with the teachers, which will allow them to feel confident of their presence in the classroom.

Reflections gathered from the Sugar Crash video, the importance of sugar was shown and how it can have a negative influence on not only children but adults also. The effects of sugar can increase many health related diseases such as diabetes, coronary heart disease and decreases the life span among us. Through the video, by being shown the amount of both added and hidden sugar in foods, it is a real eye opener as a trainee teacher, as it explains the figures in the rise of Child Obesity within our society today. As teachers it is essential to encourage exercise in our gym lessons or after school classes, to ensure these levels of child obesity drop rapidly rather than rise. Other activities such as walk to school week and healthy tuck is another effective way to encourage children to take note of the levels of sugar they are consuming, and that having a treat is acceptable as long as they are able to have a balance with physical activity to burn it off. We must have a positive impact on the children ourselves to play the lead role in inspiring children to have healthy food and routines in their childhood, to ensure this continues onto adulthood and encourages good eating habits within the children.

Semester 1 Reflection

Uncategorized, UoDEdushare

Reflect on one of the most important moments for your professional development in semester 1 and write a post about what you think you have learned from this critical incident and what the process of reflection is beginning to mean to you.

In semester one, when beginning the Working Together module, I felt nervous and worried about being put in our allocated groups in the process to complete our group presentation.  This put me on edge as I knew I did not know a lot of people on the course  and that my group was going to be with people I would not have the confidence to speak to. Although as the weeks went on I became more of a confident individual and had more courage to voice my opinions to the rest of my peers in the group. The group as a whole began as a slow start with not many people contributing in tasks because of lack of confidence which resulted in our group having lack of knowledge of the tasks we were meant to complete. Being in a collaborative group where all of the three professionals of Teachers, Social workers and CLD students came together, it showed the importance of each profession in relation to the link they have with each other. Through out agency visit to Action for Children and speaking to members of staff who are part of this agency, this can back up the fact of how the three professions link. Reflecting back on the agency visit, it appeared stressful to begin with as we did not quite have a main role lead in our group, so the progress of arranging the visit was slightly tricky but when it all came together and there was now a group leader by this stage, it became easier for us as a group as a whole.

Throughout the completion of group tasks and by analysing our agency visit, we seen that GIRFEC plays a huge role within the three professions and especially has a large impact on us as teachers today. GIRFEC explains that the child is the main approach of the theory and it is within our professions to keep the children in a happy, safe and friendly enviroment. (Scottish Government, 2012)

I began to feel an improvement in my professional development when we had to focus on working together in our groups during semester 1, with people who were randomly put in a group. I felt that in this situation it taught me that by working as a large group, it can become daunting at first but by over coming those so called “ice breakers”, we all began to voice each of our own thoughts which resulted well with great ideas for our final presentation.

Scottish Government (2017) Getting it right for every child (GIRFEC) Available at: http://www.gov.scot/Topics/People/Young-People/gettingitright (Accessed: 22 January 2018)