Shirley Warren Week 2

After working with children in school, share your observations and reflections. What surprises you? What were the challenges and how might you overcome these? What have you learnt? Make links to relevant readings.

Working with the children in school was challenging but rewarding. My initial surprise was how co-operative and eager the children were, considering this was the first time we had met. I was aware that it may be difficult to work well with the children because we do not have a professional relationship however, my wariness was immediately removed once we started working together. The children wanted to please us and would answer our questions with a eagerness to learn.

The biggest challenge I faced was handing over the responsibility to the children to produce and design the double page spread for the book. Before we arrived, I had a set idea of how I wanted it to look so it was challenging to teach the children the skills and allow them to do the work. I knew that simply doing the work for the children may accomplish the short term goal to create a double page spread, however OECD (2008) argue that by completing the work for the children will not aid them in the long run when they have to repeat the taught skill but cannot remember how to do it because the teacher did it for them the previous time. Therefore, I wanted to teach the skill and give the children a opportunity to practise the skill. I was pleasantly supposed at the fantastic ideas the children had and the pages looked better than I could have imagined. To overcome this, next time I will not have such a set idea in mind but more of an outline so the children can create their own work with the skills I've taught them. 

Another challenge was teaching children about the rights we were learning about. Our right was "the government should protect children from work that is dangerous or might hurt their health or their education". The children were only in year 1 so it was challenging to explain what the right meant and how it affected them. After explaining some of the words, such as government and dangerous, the children eventually understood what we were going to be learning about. By the end of the session, the children could successfully explain their right to another children so we all had a sense of achievement. However, to overcome this type of problem next time I would think ahead and produce a child friendly sheet with images that explain the right in a simple but effective way. 

I learnt that the children were more knowledgable with using an ipad than I previously thought. I'm aware that the children would have used an ipad before but they knew about many of the apps we were using, such as 'tellsgami, and 'explain everything', as they had watched their teacher using it. When we first visited the school, the teacher explained that children were allowed the play and learn about the iPads from a young age and Beauchamp (2012) suggests that play can form a secure basis for learning and technology aids the depth and effectiveness of play. As the children already had a basis knowledge, it created opportunities for a deeper level of learning as we could teach the children more complex skills. 

Bibliography

Beauchamp, G (2012) ICT in the Primary School, From Pedagogy to Practise. Essex: Pearsons Education Ltd

OECD (2008) Innovating to Learn, Learning to Innovate. United Kingdom: OECD Publishing