Exam stresss

Ed Studies exam in officially in 10 days and the panic has really started to set in! So stressed out, University is no easy feat! I have learnt that uni takes a lot of dedication and sometimes you have to be prepared to give up your social life in order to succeed, something that I am aware will have to happen when we become teachers. I think it's now time to grow up, take responsibility for our own learning and achieve the best of our potential!

Good luck to everyone with their studying and assignment writing...it'll soon be over!

Stressed!

Been sooo stressed with the crazy amount of uni work I've had that I've neglected this blog...oops! Have finally managed to finish my ICT elective assignment and now working on the Integrated Curriculum assignment. Exams are also looming and feeling so stressed that everything is coming at once...

Today was our last PPL tutorial which rounded up everything before our 6 week placement begins in April, and tomorrow will be our last lecture and tutorial of third year...scary! I have learnt that time flies so quickly and that it's important to make the most of student days, as soon we will be NQT's in the big bad world...eeek! For now, I'm going back to putting my head in books....roll on the end of March!!

Maths tutorials

This week in maths we were learning about teaching measure. I've always found maths challenging and always lacked confidence in simple tasks. Amanda talked us through the concept of conservation, a Piagetian theory which deals with children's lack of ability to realise that measure is not affected by experience. I've never heard of this concept before and was interesting to learn how it affects children's learning and the ways to overcome it. We also carried out a number of practical activities, including creating meter cubes of our own, helping us to visualise area and volume. These would also be useful classroom activities to help children see and experience more complex measure.

I have always found converting litres, milliteres etc difficult but this tutorial helped me to realise its not as difficult when you break it down and I managed to complete a complex problem on my own, due to being able to visualise and work out large quanities of centimeters/meters.

Overall, it was a useful tutorial in helping build my confidence in my own maths abilities, as well as my abilities to teach it to children.

Professional Panel

Today as part of our PPL module, we had the opporunity to hear 5 presentations from 5 professionals working in schools. This panel consisited of a Head teacher, an Active Schools Co-ordinator, a Principal Teacher, a Probationer and Health and Wellbeing Development Officer. This provided a wide range of experiences, interests and expertise. Each person carried out a short presentation, covering aspects of the learner's journey, first year of teaching, eco-schools, extra-curricular activities in schools and promoting health and wellbeing in the primary school. It was a really worthwhile session and all gave excellent insight into working with children on a daily basis and helped us to overcome any worries or concerns. There was an electronic blog on the screen which allowed us to text in questions we wanted to ask and it was great to see that a lot of students were feeling the same as me, particularly the question that said "Since when will we have no weekends as probationers?!". The questions were well answered and it was a useful way of keeping our attention for three hours. It has overall made me excited for my future as a primary teacher and has encouraged me to keep on top of my professional development.

Using Prezi

I had meant to post a blog about this before Christmas but it was so chaotic and I was reminded about it today. We had to carry out a maths presentation on an aspect on the history of maths and I learnt that there were a lot of actual people behind mathematical discoveries that we used today without even thinking. Our group focused on the history of Archimedes and his theory of displacement. Laura who is also in our ICT elective class created a Prezi presentation, which was a very eye-pleasing way of displaying our information and the rest of the class were suitably impressed. This has taught me the effectiveness of transferrable skills within modules and areas of the curriculum and how important this is within a classroom situation. We learnt about Prezi in our computing elective but it can be used in a variety of useful ways as a teacher. This is a link to our presentation:

https://nemo.strath.ac.uk/owa/redir.aspx?C=33856e1694eb48299baf2c1540a5dc6b&URL=http%3a%2f%2fprezi.com%2fnv6avypsrwgo%2fpresent%2f%3fauth_key%3d6l530bt%26follow%3dyqtdyrahkiwu

Lack of blogging

I have learnt over the past month that I'm a terrible multi-tasker. It has been in my mind to update this blog but placement completely took over my life! I hope to improve this using my diary that I purchased, to plan out my weekly timetable and allocate myself time for each module, in order to keep up to date with all the work required of me! Fingers crossed it goes to plan!

Today was my first day in nursery and I although I enjoyed it, it felt a lot longer than a usual school day! I learnt a lot about responsive planning and how much of an influence pre-school children have on their own learning. The whole day was based around what the children wanted to do and I learnt that as a nursery teacher, you have to step back more and let children discover things for themselves. This is frustrating at first as I'm so tempted to ask questions and encourage them to engage in worthwhile activities! I'm sure as the weeks go on, I'll get a more used to it. But so far, being in school and teaching definitely seem to be more appealing!