Teaching Practice¦ My Experience

I really wanted to share some of the images I have taken, from my recent Teaching Practice this year. I was teaching in 3rd Class (age 8-9 years) in an Urban DEIS band 2 school. In the following video, you will see some of my thematic 2-D and 3-D displays, some samples of the Powerpoint Presentations I used in my Irish lessons and Science and some of the children's work. Some of the curricular material I covered included in the video:

English- Procedural Writing, Letter Writing

Irish- Ar Scoil

Mathematics- Measures-Weight. 

I particularly enjoyed covering the topic of Weight in Maths. It's a very hands-on, practical topic and the children loved it also. Most of my lessons featured some practical tasks where pupils weighed particular items e.g. 1KG bag of sugar, 2KG bag of carrots and porridge, using weighing scales. The pupils took part in group work in most of these lessons, and used a weighing scales and balance to complete tasks (Active Learning). There were no more than 4 to a group. The smaller, more intimate groups work better for these lessons I found and all children were eager to get involved. 

I also used some Mental Maths problems at the start of my Maths lessons. I learned about this useful strategy while covering my lectures online on HELMS and it worked really well. This activity took 3-5 mins at the start of the lessons and was so effective at getting the pupil's brains working mathematically! There was so much excitement in our lessons when I featured this strategy. Maths was never so much fun! So I've included an image of some of the Mental problems I'd ask the pupils. I varied this up, depending on the content covered. I recommend you try this with your class and it's something I will be continuing to do on my next Teaching Practice!

Visual Arts- Constructions-Dioramas, Mother's Day bookmarks, Fabric and Fibre using organic materials.

Science- Soil, Our Environment, Renewable and Non-Renewable Energy.

Early Finishers Activities- based on Maths (Weight) and English (sample procedural texts and questions).

Why not have a look at a Photostory I made!

Let me know if you use a particular strategy in your class! I'm always eager to learn new strategies and implement them when I can. Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed the video.

Sorcha.