So I've now done 4 school placements in total - and all in the space of a couple of years. The first three were in secondary schools (two English, one Catalan) and obviously before I started this blog so I can't really write about them here, although a blog about my life and work in the Catalan school can be found at Two and a Half Spaniards. This last one however has been in a primary school (the one I used to attend, in fact) and boy has it been different. I decided to publish this post after the end of the placement and the staff weekend away at the end of it to give me time to collect my thoughts and experiences into a concise, coherent passage.
Now I don't know if you the reader have ever been back to your primary (or elementary) school after leaving as a fresh-faced 11-year-old, but the main thing you notice is how everything used to be a lot bigger, including the number of kids in your class - although this may be just me - I remember when I was in year 6 (5th grade) there were about 30 of us, I spent most of my time working with that class that now has 18 and they were struggling for room! For the life in me I cannot fathom how 30 of us managed to fit in there, although the current year 6 teacher is quite creative and likes to build things out of cardboard, so a whole corner of the room has been dedicated to it.
Onto my actual work though, and it has sort of been split into two parts: the first part I did for two weeks during my own Easter holidays (we get 4 weeks at university as opposed to the standard 2) and it was very much focused on SATs and the numeracy and literacy involved, that's another thing that's changed in that when I was their age we also had a KS2 SAT in science. This gave me a chance to really practice my maths teaching by taking a few of the children through to the library and working through a mock SAT arithmetic paper. The closeness of being with a group of just 4 - much like in Catalunya - meant I was really able to get inside their thought processes on the questions and make sure they understood what was being asked, even if they were a little embarrassed at first to tell me what they'd done as it turned out to be wrong. Of course on some questions though, this part was easy, on one of them they had to circle the decimal equivalent of 1/5 out of a choice of 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4 and 0.5, it was easy to deduce what had happened inside the minds of those who circled 0.5.
I also briefly went into the year 1 class as they were doing a project on Spain, and I was just itching to get in some Spanish teaching, this however was a lot more difficult as they first of all had to get round just how I actually knew Spanish - how do you know Spanish if you're not Spanish? Why did you live there? - Just so many questions before I could even get onto all the 'my name is...', 'I am ... years old' etc. I couldn't really do any Spanish in year 6 as language-wise they were all focused on building up their French portfolios for secondary school, and je ne parle pas français yet.
The second part involved coming back after I had done my own exams (or big SATs as the children dubbed them) and after they they had done theirs which meant education-wise there was, well, nothing to do, except a few transitional numeracy exercises. So they filled the time mostly with preparing for their end-of-year show, church service and Summer Fayre and PE, all of which I got heavily involved in, there was allsorts to build for the show and it needed quite a lot of expertise! All in all it was a fun few weeks with very little actual teaching involved, in fact I think the ones who learnt the most were myself and the other volunteers!
At the end of the last day of school I was made to promise some of the children I'd go back to my old highschool as a teacher so I could teach them maths, and I haven't ruled it out! I have been advised to stay in England for at least the first year after completing my PgCE (which would have been the plan anyway) and then who knows!
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