Internship
Cameron House School
February 20th and 21st
This week I started off my Internship in Reception at Cameron House. Reception is very similar to pre-school. It was a lot of fun, but also a lot of work. Not only do you have to teach the children, you have to cater to all their little needs like helping each one with their coats, shoe, helping them wipe their mouths, dress for swimming, etc. I have a lot of respect for Diane and Vanessa (the two teachers who are with reception) because they certainly have their hands full! On this particular Monday morning, Vanessa had an appointment so Diane was left with 18+ little ones. Luci asked if I would be willing to leave my original class (class 5) to help her out so of course I agreed! I was only there until lunch, but that was enough time to learn just how exhausting they were! While in reception we worked on counting money. Diane and I divided up play money into three different categories based on the children’s learning abilities, also known as differentiated instruction. This is a technique used in education designed to cater to all learning abilities. I have noticed that differentiated instruction is used constantly in every classroom at Cameron House. The children are all split up into animal categories within their classes. It is very clever, as the students do not know the difference between the animal groups and everyone is able to learn at their ability level. After working with money the children had French with Yolanda (French Teacher) the children worked on their numbers and colors. They know numbers 1-10 and quite a few colors. I have no prior knowledge of French, as I took four years of Spanish in high school and a year in college, so it was fun to learn since I was at the exact same level as the preschoolers! After lunch I went back to class 5 they were busy working on props for the big play coming up so I basically helped out Mary Ann with grading papers and booklets as she was behind from holiday.
Tuesday I was back in class 5 once again, and Mary Ann told me that I would get to be with her and class 5 for the remainder of the semester unless anyone else needed my assistance on a particular day. This made me very glad because class 5 is my favorite and Mary Ann is my favorite teacher to work with! She is so kind! She takes the time to listen to the children even if there is absolutely no point to the story. I really admire her patience and passion towards teaching. She has also made my abroad experience that much more enjoyable! She makes me feel welcome and always talks to me about my trips, weekends, and everything else. I am learning a lot from her and I cannot wait to apply what I have learned to my future experiences back home. On this particular day in class 5 we learned about time. We split into two groups in order to give the students more one on one attention. This technique is called parallel or co teaching. I like co teaching as we planned a whole unit with a partner using this technique for our final back home. Mary Ann took the higher ability learners, while I helped out the others. I had the students make clocks out of paper plates so they would be able to have a visual. We wrote in all aspects to the clock including minuets, seconds, and even sayings like ten till, half past, etc. On the outside of our clocks we printed the 24 hour clock. This is one form of time that is often used here in London. Surprisingly the 24 clock was what my group had the hardest time with. They could not seem to keep it straight so along with the clocks we decided to make flash cards. For example we would write 6 on one side of the card and then 18 on other to show that they represented to the same thing. This seemed to help a lot! Time is difficult for many children to grasp, especially when it is expressed through an analog clock! However, once it clicks they will never forget it. We also had sport today where the girls had a hockey match against another school called Knights Bridge! They were all very excited about it. They started off losing, two to zero. It was so cute; they girls would come over and rant off so many excuses as to why they were losing. They told me they were older, the wind was on their side, they were tripping them, they had an excuse for everything and it reminded me of my club soccer team when we were in elementary school. We always won, but when we would occasionally lose we could think of every possible excuse. The good news is the girls did end up winning 3-2 and they were very excited on the bus ride home! This week was a lot of fun at Cameron House I got the opportunity to be hands on with the children and to actually teach. Mary Ann wants to do group work every week now, so I am really looking forward to getting to spend more time actually instructing the students!
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