Frustrating Day and Some Conversations

Having spent a good deal of time planning and making sure this whole week was sorted out (see previous post), today was a slight letdown in that things didn't go as planned.  That in itself could be a valuable lesson, but that's not what I got out of the experience the most.

Basically the problems in the classroom today stemmed from issues around transitions. What it boils down to is slowness and not doing what they're suposed to be doing. This goes for pretty much all transitions and it's really only a handful of children setting the whole thing off.

I had a long conversation with my flatmate (who is herself a teacher - and a tutor teacher on top) about this and we talked about ways in which to put the onus on the children.  A lot does come down to me and the way I impress upon them the need for urgency.  Most children, as she says (and I agree), don't really see school as a rush, though I do, knowing how much we have to do. Two major things have come out of this particular conversation to work on: 1) getting things out of the cloak bay takes a ridiculous amount of time. A solution could be to send in 10 children, count down from 10 and if they don't have anything, they still need to be lined up. This, I want to try tomorrow. 2) I'm going to set the timer during the daily 5 to a) count up and b) repeat at the end so that the children have a clear indication of how long they are taking and how long I expect.  Perhaps evening keeping a "world record" on the board so that they have motivation to go quicker.  We'll see.

A third thing, which came out of discussions with the children in fact, is that 20 minute sessions for the daily 5 might be too long.  Not so much for their concentration, but for fitting it all in.  We only were able to fit three blocks in (after the shared book and spelling lessons) before 10:50, and that was a good hour and 40 minutes.  Time does need to be made up there - at least until they get the transitions better.

There's more that I could work on at this point, but I'll focus on those things right now and try my best with the rest.  No need to overwhelm myself.