Week Seven: Professional

As part of my observation in Willie Price I have to write a three day lesson plan and teach one lesson.  As myself and Sarah are in the same class we decided to co teach for our one lesson.  This was more convenient because there is only one hour a day where the class teacher actually gets to teach so we had to make full use of this hour.  It also meant we both gained a new experience, and were able to learn from each other.

As we started to learn about lesson planning in one of our classes, it became apparent to us how much we knew about teaching in comparison to third year students at Ole Miss.  Here the student teachers don’t actually go to a school until their third year and they only teach one lesson that year. I found this extremely odd, especially in comparison to home, where we are made to teach for four weeks in first year.  Therefore having to plan and teach one lesson was something myself and sarah actually looked forward too, as we had a lot more experience than the rest of our class.

We decided to teach our lesson this week as the topic for the week was transportation, which was something we both felt we could plan good activities for.  On thursday we taught our lesson on cars, which the children appeared to thoroughly enjoy, and get a lot out of.  The main challenge for myself and Sarah was not actually the co teaching. We managed to structure our lesson very well, with one of us teaching the opening and one the closing.  We then shared the main content and activities.  However our main challenge was in fact planning activities to suit the age group.  The children in our class are all either three or four years old, which made them younger than any children we had previously taught.  The children couldn’t actually read or write, yet they were extremely intelligent.  They knew their alphabet, number, colours etc, so we had to come up with a way for them to learn without actually having to do any formal writing.

We used the idea of centres to help the children learn.  At one centre they practiced their letter C, at one they sorted their toy cars into various categories, at another they made their own car picture out of paint, and at the last centre they made car noises which they had heard in the book we read them.  All four centres worked extremely well, with the children practicing various skills.  Myself and Sarah were extremely pleased with the outcome of the lesson.

Despite the increasing amount of uni work, I am still loving life here in Oxford.  As the weather warms up there is so much more to see and do, with Baseball season starting and spring break just around the corner.  As I sit out in the sun writing this I still find it hard to believe that I’m in Mississippi, and I’m beginning to wonder will it ever sink in!