Today was my first day at my placement school.
It's called Caloundra City Private School and I am assisting with a year 5 class (grade 5).
My mentor teacher, Nicky is the woman I am sharing the classroom with. She seems perfect. She's young and super nice and I feel she will be very supportive. She admits when she doesn't know something and will look things up online to be sure of things.
Each child at this school over the grade 4 is equipped with a laptop (crazy). They use it throughout the day and then take it home with them at night to charge it, and to play interactive games. Also, I don't think this teacher supplies a lot of homework to the children (woohoo).
When we arrived at the school, I thought I was going to throw up. I was super nervous.
Then we found out that there weren't going to be any kids at the school today - perfect! So we were able to sit in on the staff meeting - held by the principal for 2 hours.
What was interesting about this was that the principal, Karon went to ONTARIO for some education courses. She was explaining what we do in Ontario and wanted to implement some of their skills into her school (awesome).
In her slide show she provided pictures of the CN Tower, Niagara Falls and downtown Toronto :)
And then had morning tea. 'Morning Tea' is huge here in Australia. It's like recess but they have a snack/tea. Today the snacks were amazing. Us pre-service teachers ate so much - it was REAL good food. They had eggs and bacon in muffin tins, bread, scones with butter and jam, a yogurt trifle, and fruit. We ate up so much. Then we resumed into another meeting where two teachers explained a new teaching method regarding Literacy. How to teach literacy block effectively in a group setting.
After this session we broke off into our classrooms where our mentor teachers spoke to us about our classrooms. We have a couple of low learners, and a few with special needs. The class is made up of 28 STUDENTS! So I am sure once (next) Monday finishes, I'll be exhausted. I was tired after orientation today when there wasn't any students involved!
We then planned a unit of work - for Science. The unit plan is called Matter Matters and we're going to be talking about solids, liquids and gases. We planned some great experiments!
All and all, it wasn't as scary as I worked myself up to be.
(She also mentioned that she isn't strong in maths so hopefully we can help each other). Eks!
Sounds so cool! Love that the principal included Ontario in her presentation! How cool is that!!!!
ReplyDeleteThat is a LOT of kids- 28!!! Funny story - when I was in grade 4, we had an exchange teacher from Australia - we were completely obsessed with her accent - seriously the first week of classes that was ALL we talked about at recess. We also thought she was the coolest because she gave us stuff from Australia and brought in these mint candies and vegemite! So I am positive that the kids will love you when you speak and if you bring them something Canadian!!!
Totally - I even leaned over to my mentor teacher and said, "that's where I am from". haha
ReplyDeleteIt's crazy that there are 28 children there... especially in a private school. Some of the high school classrooms only have 10 students!!! (Now that is getting your monies worth).
A lot of the students at this school have gotten supply teachers and pre-service teachers from canadians so i don't know how much they'll be amazed with my accent.
we shall see :)