Teaching Portfolio

Today we took part in a Friends for Life teacher training course. This course outlined the health programme and showed teachers how to implement the programme in their classrooms. I found this course interesting and the Friends for Life programme looks like a fantastic resource to use in the classroom. The way the programme is structured would lend itself to a great term one health unit however I feel I would also like to lift out various activities and sessions across the year as various needs arise. I have started to use yoga and deep breathing with my children as a wind-down between activities and will continue to do this in term 2. The programme highlighted the importance of teaching children these relaxation and coping skills so it’s good to know I was on the right track! I am looking forward to having this programme up and running in my classroom as I think it will be hugely beneficial to a lot of my children.

This afternoon Room 25 hosted a learning celebration to celebrate all our hard work in our inquiry topic. I decided to have a celebration as the children have worked really hard this term and achieved a huge amount. This was a great opportunity to invite our Whanau and other staff members into the classroom to celebrate along with us. The celebration was a fantastic success with a great turn out from parents, grandparents and siblings. The children really enjoyed the opportunity to share with their families as well as other teachers that they might nit otherwise get to share with. This experience really highlighted for me the strength of relationships in and out of the classroom. To see my students brimming with pride and knowledge about their chosen country was a really empowering experience for them. The feedback I got from parents was extremely positive with several thanking me for giving them the opportunity to come in to the classroom and share work. The students had obviously ta...

This week I took part in a group of teachers observing Numicon in the junior school. I saw this resource being used in a variety of ways which emphasised to me just how versatile this resource is. Although I did not see the resource being used at stage 4/5 of the numeracy framework several teachers took the time to explain how the equipment could be used across these stages. I think the visual format of Numicon would be greatly beneficial to several children in my class. One of my groups are finding it difficult to see how 6 groups of 2 are different to 2 groups of 6, I think using Numicon would very quickly make this obvious! I have used counters, drawings and objects to model how the two sets would look but still we struggle. I would like to have the opportunity to trial using Numicon with this group, particularly my priority learner. I would also like to observe Numicon being used at a middle school level to gain more ideas of how to make the most of the resource.

This workshop was run by the University of Otago and focused particularly on culturally responsive classroom management. I found this workshop really interesting and valuable as it gave me the opportunity to reflect on what I had been doing so far in my teaching career and discuss these actions with people at the same stage as me. I took away lots of ideas from this workshop but one I would particularly like to implement in term two is circle time. The workshop discussed culturally responsive ways to run circle time in a classroom and I would like to find out more about this. I think circle time will give everybody a chance to be heard not just a few louder personalities and hopefully create a stronger sense of team within Room 25.