Helping at school

Activities

Spending the morning at school was really good and very interesting. For register they all sat on the carpet and Miss Biscoe also explained what they were gonig to do during the day and did some maths based on who was having hot dinners / packed lunches and how many children were there (as Cody was ill). After register they all did some handwriting practice in books at tables, copying cursive ys and zs. Elliott was good at the y, but took a little longer to get z working, but he got there. When they finished that they sat on the carpet again reading a book while they waited for everyone to finish handwriting practice. Next they did some phonics which involved a change of teacher and different groupings. So instead of being done by class they split them by animal and all the ladybirds got together with Elliott and sat on the carpet in Miss Biscoe's classroom. Another teacher then came in and using the laptop onto a projector they used an animation to learn about "ee" sounds. This involved taking turns to press the screen to identify images of words with "ee" sounds in them (e.g. sheep, jeep, etc). After this finished they all got back into their classes again and then they moved to a next door classroom with Biscoe to find out what their "job" for the mornnign was. This was making fossils. They all sat on the carpet and listened as Miss Biscoe explained what fossils were and showed them some fossils another teacher had brought in. Then they all went in to the central area between the classrooms where they sat at tables and "made a fossil". They did this by flattening out a piece of clay, writing their name in it on the back and then pressing plants and toy dinosaurs against the clay to leave an imprint. I helped Elliott's table with this, though Elliott didn't need much help. After this it was child initiated time and Elliott played with Marley and Adam with some toys. I helped show any children interested more of the fossils that had been brought in and Elliott, Marley, Adam and Charlie all got involved with this and we talked about how the fossils were of animals from a "long, long, long, long time ago". After this Elliott went outside and was playing on the play equipment in his wellies and coat with lots of different children including Marley and Tahlia. At the end of playtime they all changed back into shoes and lined up in classes with their fingers on their mouths and their other hand with a finger pointing in the air to show they were ready. Then they went back inside and the morning finished with a lesson about 3D shapes. They all sat on the carpet again and Miss Biscoe showed them cones, cylinders, spheres and cuboids and examples of how their used in real life (e.g. a pritt-stick). This finished with the children splitting into 3 groups to do 3D shape based activities. One group sat with Miss Davidson to look at more examples, one group sat at chairs and tables with Miss Biscoe to do a written exercise and one group, including Elliott, sat at another table and chairs and did an independent colouring exercise based on the 3D shapes with me helping.