Reflection 1b: Creating a stimulating learning environment/adapting teaching

Creating a stimulating learning environment/adapting teaching

January 7 - January 26

These first three weeks have allowed me to experiment with different kinds of differentiation within the class, respond quickly to pupils misconceptions, and tested my ability to adapt the content of my lesson to match the children's knowledge.

During one of my Literacy lessons in which we were focusing on "adding describing words to make sentences interesting", I utilised one of my TA's by sending her and two children to work on word-level skills using basic phonics to spell words using "banagrams". This was then followed by using story dice to create a a story using visual literacy techniques. The children orally told their story to the TA who wrote them on a whiteboard. This allowed them to focus on the story rather than the writing, which they both dislike and need alot of support to do. It also meant they didn't forget their story whilst writing and could just think about it! The following day they worked independently to add describing words into a typed version of their story. 

During a different literacy session, in which I had planned to discuss adjectives, and using "wow" ones rather than "boring" ones, I had to do a bit of a u-turn as none of the children knew what a noun was (by definition or example). We spent the lesson looking at different kinds of nouns - i.e. person, place or thing, and then describing our favourite from each category. This tied into our topic quite well as we are studying "where in the world" so the children were able to name oceans, continents, countries, cities and towns as part of their "places" category!

For our final science lesson on rocks and soils we used pipettes to drop water onto rocks to see if they were permeable. We had previously done this as part of a bigger "experiment" using part the bbc ks2 bite-size website. However, doing it "for real" gave the children such a deeper understanding of permeability, and indeed of how experiments work! From this lesson we had a discussion on "fair tests" and "human error", and all the children are now excited about our next topic "solids and liquids" for more great experiments! Incidentally  behaviour during this lesson was excellent as all the children were engaged! (hands-on, no writing!)

Before we start our solids and liquids topic we had a group discussion on what we already know about solids and liquids and what we would like to learn. Hopefully this will allow me to plan some experiments that will challenge some misconceptions, and further their knowledge of the subject! The most interesting question asked "Are we solid or liquid" was met by several "but that's obvious!" from children which was quickly silenced by the asker who then ventured "but what about our blood?" - this could be an interesting one!