Reflections on the start of the year
So far this year, I’m really enjoying teaching. I have a reasonably bright Year 6 class, with some very able children. Most of my class are fairly well behaved, with just a small handful of attention-seeking boys. The majority of the children were in my class last year, so I know them really well and they know my expectations.
One boy has always been prone to having a bit of a sulk. At the start of last year he would sit under a table and refuse to come out. He then attempted to progress to storming out of the classroom. But he now seems to have realised that this isn’t allowed – earlier this week, he got annoyed by a comment that another pupil made and got up to storm off. He got to the doorway, looking as though he was about to walk straight out, then stopped and just stood by the door having his sulk!!
Most of the children in my class are generally keen to learn, and are beginning to concentrate well on their work. I think they have the potential to produce some excellent pieces of work this year and to make good progress. At least, I hope so, since for the school to have any chance of decent SATs results my whole class need to get Level 4s in everything. Some of them need to move from a 3c to at least a 4c by Term 5.
I really missed not having the more able group in my class last year. I’ve had some wonderful discussions with a few of them this year. For example, we started off with a basic timeline of world history before we started our topic on Ancient Greece, and ended up discussing whether lizards were dinosaurs and why films show people and dinosaurs existing at the same time! I also had an in-depth discussion about quadrilaterals with a few of them during lunch time. They were trying to understand how a square is a special type of parallelogram and, quite independently, came to the realisation that “A square is a regular rectangle and an oblong is an irregular rectangle.” The LEA consultant who’d presented our staff meeting the night before would have been proud, after she went on about the distinction between oblongs and rectangles!
The ‘love of learning’ is starting to rub off on some of the other children too. A group of girls who, last year, didn’t enjoy maths and thought they couldn’t do maths spent a wet lunchtime last week making up sequences for each other using negative numbers and decimals.
The improvement in behaviour since last year means that I feel comfortable being more creative in my teaching and taking a few risks. I finally feel as though I am teaching, rather than just managing behaviour and trying to teach in between!
Filed under: Behaviour, Gifted & talented, Maths, Professional Development
