Work Experience so far...

Right, well I've done two days work experience now. Both fridays, both in the same class. It's a mixed yr3/4 class and we work with the lowest set maths and the highest set english.
Some of the kids doing maths still have to check the number square to work out what 6 minus 1 is, others have a higher ability but the difference between them and the high set maths I saw last year is incredible! Mind you, their level of maths is much more the level I am happy working at right now, maths is not my favourite subject!
The english lesson is more my cup of tea. I write a lot myself, am part of several wirters groups, and am about to start running a creative writing at the bookshop I'm at right now.

To remind myself, if nothing else, I'm going to list here the lessons I've been part of and anything I've learnt or questions I now have.

Friday 2nd
Maths was about adding and subtraction using H,T,U. Hmmm, I should remember to write these things down straight away as I've forgotten already what happened! Apart from realising that I'm having problem explaining things in an easy to understand way. Although I guess I didn't know what we were doing until 5 minutes before I started so I'll have time to think it over when I'm actually teaching!
Creative writing - the kids were read the start of a story about a dragon appearing in a little boys room and demanding he gets him loads of food. The kids had to decide how they thought the story ended and write it. That was enjoyable - loads of imagination in the room. It was good too because the teacher sat in the corner of the room listening to readers and left me to answer questions and generally manage the kids.
I found that my 'stare' worked a treat to settle kids as they were beginning to get rowdy, and if a group were chatting or messing about too much I just had to stand next to them for them to calm down and get back to work. Not a word said!
Then I took a group into the shared area to do some sewing (argghh), which went well. Mostly.
The youngest lot were well behaved (the arghh comes from 5 voices all at once needing needles threaded and stitches unstitched) but after lunch I had to have a go at the older ones to calm them down. It really brought home that you cannot be too pally or let the kids get away with too much because they WILL talk advantage of you!
I ended up saying something like 'I can't believe you older children are so much less well behaved than the younger ones I had earlier!' in a sharp and disbelieving voice. I was a little nervous of telling them off since they weren't 'my' class and I was a visitor in school, but as I said it another teacher walked by and said 'Quite right.' backing me up. The kids calmed down, needing only a few more sharp words to get them working with just normal chatter instead of stupid behaviour. Phew!
Then we had PE - hockey. I only had to tell of a child for whacking his stick around a tree, another for deliberately slamming into another child and following a pair of girls around who would rather just natter. Easy!
Friday 9th - Maths: more adding and subtracting. I worked with the lowest ability children while the rest of the class did more complicated work. They were pretty good with 1:1 attention but I can imagine that when they're lost in the whole classroom with no help they must get very far behind, their potential missed. One girl had an illness that meant she missed lots of school, she was really bright and picked up everything incredibly quickly and it was such a shame she was disadvantaged.
Creative writing - putting speec within speech marks and using correct punctuation.
The highest ability kids picked this up really well, the lower ability had great imagination and worte funny enjoyable stuff but struggled with the concept of speech for different people beginning on different lines. They also often needed a kick start to get them going. It's often hard to get going with a blank page and I think that a quick roleplay session or working in pairs to discuss ideas migh have fired them up more. It was also a shame to see kids (boys mostly) with a good ability to write so disinterested about writing. It's something to think about.
Listened to some group reading. The teacher said that she didn't have a hope of listening to 30 readers a week so getting them to take turns reading a page each of a book was a good way of hearing lots of readers at once.
Then more sewing - mothers day is looming and they are behind! More arggghh, but it wasn't so bad. I kept a group with me while the others had PE. It was good to be in charge of the group alone.
Looking forward to more next week.
The questions I came away with were - children were told they could not subtract 9 from 7 as 9 was larger than 7. Do they then learn in year 6 about negative numbers? Do we just pretend they don't exist until then?
Also, the learning objectives were on a whiteboard but not referred to and in very technical SoW type language - is this t=normal? Wouldn't it be better to have it in 'kids' language? That's what I'll try to do. If they don't understand the LO then there's no point it being there!
Anyway, there's my thoughts.
Advice for today - write you experiences down RIGHT AWAY or you will forget what happened!