Mr and Mrs

From what I remember from when I was in primary school we never called a male teacher sir. It was always Mr "so and so". Female teachers were usually called Mrs or Miss "so and so" but if we couldn't be bothered with the full name we would shorten it to miss. When ever I have gone into schools to do work experience I have always let the children use my first name to address me. This is mainly because I was quite uncomfortable being called Mr Corlett when I was still at school my self. Most of the children were happy to call me by my first name but I found some were not accustomed to the idea. I had this interesting conversation with a year 4:

Boy: Whats your name?

Me: Richard

Boy: No, your last name.

Me: Oh...Corlett

Boy: Ah, thanks Mr Corlett 

As you can imagine I found this quite odd but it is interesting to note that as a teacher you do loose your first name as both parents and children will call you Mr/Mrs in and out side of school. 

Now on my first university placement I've come across another interesting phenomena to do with names. I'm with a year 1 class and as yet only 3 or 4 of them have manage to remember and use my name. Thy do know who I am when the class teacher says "Mr Corlett" and it's not that I don't try to reminded them of my name but I have found that I am very often responding to being called "miss". This is something I've never come across before and I know it's not a joke as children I have never met before will still call me miss. I've thought about this and I think I know why.

As far as they're concerned the tag "miss" is applied to all "teachers". It is not gender specific. This is due to the way the school is structured; they have very little contact with male teachers until KS2. As all of their teachers are female up till then and they don't often see the male ones, "miss" becomes the generic term to use when speaking to a teacher.  

School experience coming up!

Very soon, next week in fact, I, along with everyone else in my year, will be starting our first school experience. I will be working with a year 1 class for three weeks. This will be great fun but I do have quite a few worries. Firstly this will be a massive primary school compared to what I'm used to back home. Interestingly OFSTED describe the school as medium sized!

I suppose the biggest worry is work load. Having three weeks in school doing lesson plans, observations and reflective diaries I also have various essays and assignments to write deadlined for the week after I get back from placement. This is probably good preparation for becoming a teacher and having a never ending pile of paperwork to do, but right now I'm getting worried.

Here's the plan: I am going to try to use this blog as reflective diary. At the end of every week I will pick a point and write about it, this could be anything that happened; an idea I tried, a problem that I had to solve or something that went completely wrong and I ant to know why. Hopefully if I get some feed back then this will be really useful.

Anyway, apart from all my worrying I can't wait to get into school!

Language and reading notes

Just some brief notes and observations that I have made of learning to speak and read.

I have been trying to teach my self Russian since the summer and I have had some interesting experiences that can relate to the classroom. I have been thinking about the differences there are between me teaching myself and how a child will learn to speak and read and all so some of the similarities. By learning a new language it puts me in place to understand slightly better some of the problems faced by children in learning to read and write.

This is some what of an experiment for me as I wanted to find a good way of teaching my self Russian and do it better than any teacher has ever taught me French. I started by teaching myself the Cyrillic alphabet with the aim being able to read. Reading books is apparently a good way of learning a language so I'm told. After two days of intensive study I had learnt the alphabet and a few more days after that I was able to read Russian quite well, if not very slowly.

Now this is where I start to find problems, the first being, what good is it being able to read if you don't understand anything your reading? I found that although I could sound out the words I didn't know what any of them meant. This can often be the case with children who are taught to sound out each word but are never told what the words mean. But here is where children, as native speakers, should be able to pick up the meaning fairly easily. As, in most cases, they can already speak fairly fluently before arriving at school, children will already know, or have heard, the words they are reading. They will already know most of the grammatical rules even if they aren't aware of them, and they are constantly submerged in the language. In my case I am able to read words I have never heard, in a language I have little experience in, that has a completely different set of grammatical rules to my own.

Being surrounded by language is the most natural way of picking it up. When we are very young we are constantly being bombarded with words. We may not be able to say any of them but as we start to see them in context very soon meaning will become clear. We learn words by seeing examples and variations of them in the real world. To learn what the word car is a child is not brought to a car and told "this is a car" but will see have experience of cars by being outside and seeing them go by. As more examples are collected the child will learn the difference between a car, van and lorry and build up a bank of different examples of what a car is.

I have experienced this first hand when trying to learn Russian and it is very easy to remember words said in context. The one word that I learnt in seconds is мороженое, the word for Ice cream. I learnt this word so easily because at the time I was told it I was holding an ice cream. The point I am trying to make in this article is that it's easier for a child to learn to read if they already know the words. The best way for them to learn the words is to hear them, either through conversation, audio books or just being told them. It is no good being able to decipher symbols if you don't know what they mean.

Writing a story....

In a recent lecture we were asked to text in how we could make writing a story multimodal or empowering, or both I suppose. I didn't think I could give this task any justice in a text so I made this blog to share my ideas.

So how do you make writing a story multimodal? Before considering the answer look at what is being asked. Because we want to make this a multimodal task it should be noted that "writing", in the traditional sense of the word, sitting down with pen and paper, is not what is about to happen. the question should be interpreted as "creating a story".

Before setting the task of creating a story I would look at what I wanted the end product to be. I could have a story written or typed out, with maybe a picture or two to go with it. This would give me a chance to see how well the individual child is performing in their creative and writing skills. Perhaps I want a piece of drama acted out by members of the group. This would allow teamwork, creative thinking, writing skills if a scrip is required, and confidence building dramatic skills through performing the story. I could even have the story presented through video, a poem, song or just pictures.

What I will do for this scenario is assume that I'm not setting this work purely as a literacy task. My aim will be to empower the children to take control of their own learning (NCSL 2007). I would ask them to create a story, in groups, but I don't want to read it. I want it presented to me, and the rest of the class, in another form. This could be in a film, a play, as a choral speaking piece, a poem or song, or they could read it to the class themselves. Now this might seem like I'm asking allot but they will already have all the tools there to use. My idea is to have this as a final display of what they have learnt throughout the term.

This project could be run throughout the term covering nearly all areas of the curriculum. I shall just give a very brief overview of how each curriculum subject can be involved:

Literacy: Through literacy I would look at how stories are structured, what goes into them, what makes a good story and what kinds of stories there are. I would also look into

By looking at how stories are structured, how different cultures make and tell stories and how we tell stories today through film and drama, I could make the topic cover many different areas of the curriculum. By looking to all the different areas of story telling, seeing examples and even trying out their own ideas, the children would build up a knowledge bank of methods, ideas and structures concerning story creation and telling. This information could then be drawn upon when it is time for them to create their story. The creation of the story can be as multimodal as the children wish to make it but as they would have a wealth of information to draw from it would likely be a multimodal production.

The ideas in this post are only explained in brief and by a student so they may not work but I would certainly like to try.

NCSL(2007) Strategic Leadership in ICT, Nottingham, SLICT
Quinlan, O. (2011) "Throwing open the tool box" Oliver Quinlan: Learning, teaching, technology, 13 September. Available at: http://www.oliverquinlan.com/blog/ (Accessed: 7 October 2011)

 
  

What this blog is for

I have made this blog for a reason. Not just to ramble on and on and on about me, but to use it as a tool to help myself and to help others. As I am only a student teacher I can't really post amazing findings that will shock the "World of Education". I can try and might succeed in some small way, but I don't expect much. No, the reason I have made this blog is to help with my reflective practice. For those of you who have done your research you should know what this is. I intend to post at least once a week something interesting that I have found out, or thought of, or dreamed up, and hopefully others can comment and share their own thoughts. When it comes to teaching practice I will talk about a key point that happened that day, or week, mentioning what I did and how well it worked. In this way hopefully I will learn from others, and others can learn from what has been written. Even if no one comments at least I have written it down, if only to help myself.

Why bother blogging?

I've never been one for blogging before. Usually I hate it and avoid it like the plague! This is due to my complete distrust of the people on the internet. Why would I want to tell someone I can't see anything about be? Any why would anyone care in the first place?

While spending an hour in a hot, sweaty lecture theater, listening to a talk on Web 2.0 and how many different cultures have sprung up because of it. I began to wonder what any of this had to with me. Interspersed between the wonders of the web were comments and displays of how it can be used in classrooms and specifically, how blogging can improve a classes performance. 

This is all very good stuff but I don't actually know how a blog works or what to put in one, having no experience in blogging. So here I am trying my best to start and keep up a blog. After hearing how brilliant blogs are meant to be in education and how many resources there are through use of blogs I've decided to dabble in blogging myself. I have no wish to be left behind when this becomes a standard procedure in every classroom. Nor do I wish to miss out on all that information I have never really accessed due to my miss trust of blogs.  So there it is. This is why I shall start a blog.