I am gutted to be over and done with in the library but was so excited to be back in the School environment. I will hardly get to teach on this placement as there will be so much focus on our production: Seussical. My mentor is getting relief next week so that all time can be spent on finalising everything for our production to go on stage at Mandurah Performing Arts Centre (MPAC) . This week was mostly spent observing music and health lessons that my mentor was teaching. This has been so beneficial to me as my mentor works with pre-primary kids, kindergarten and junior school pupils. This has allowed me to gain more experience with infants before MA3 placement next year.
I’ve really loved observing health and music lessons as I have not taught either before and now I feel more confident in being able to teach certain topics. Throughout our lessons with Health, we have been discussing medicine and how to properly take medicine with the younger pupils. It’s also been incredibly beneficial to be observing music lessons as my mentor also teaches the Year 7’s, which is equivalent to 1st year of secondary school. I’ve loved working with such a wide and varying range of ages in subjects that I am inexperienced in.
However, my favourite experience so far has becoming so involved with Seussical. Rehearsals are becoming more frequent with Thursday rehearsals happening as well as Sundays 9-5 and Mondays after school. I have been involved in creating hats such as those pictured above for all of the senior ‘whos’ to wear during the show. Another prac student has joined MCC and is in her 4th year of studying to be a secondary drama teacher so it has been amazing to compare and discuss the differences in our experiences of studying to become teachers. Me and her have been put in charge of props and costumes and I am getting so excited for next week – production week- the closer we get! I have never been involved in any sort of theatre production so this is all entirely new to me and I love how much all of the pupils are able to really feed off of each others energy to become so excited for the show and passionate to put on an amazing performance.
Seussical is a musical that combines many of the dearly loved Dr. Seuss’s tales into an all singing, all dancing show. To be perfectly honest I could not stand musicals up until recently and was a wee bit put off of the thought of doing a musical, but my mind is totally changed now. I was not expecting this level of professionalism from a school show whatsoever. I was expecting one show to be put on in the school gym, this is totally different to what I expected. The amount of talent these pupils have in this musical is nothing short of astounding and the level of professional commitment they all have towards the show is incredible. I’ve absolutely adored working with the high school pupils throughout the past couple of weeks and feel it’s allowed me to really make the most of my experience by working with such a varied age group.
