Thursday, March 31, 2011

A Week on Prac

This past week I've been on prac at a local school every day!


It's my last prac before officially becoming a proper teacher in June, so I'm soaking up every minute of it (hence the lack of attention paid to this blog recently!)


I have a Kindergarten class, and they are so fun to plan lessons for... although catering to the needs of 22 different children who have only just come out of pre-school six weeks ago has it's challenges.


For one of our assignments, we had to create a lesson that qualified as a multi-engaging experience- meaning that it held the kids' interest and addressed outcomes from multiple subject areas.


I chose to plan a Maths lesson with Science and Creative Arts elements as well. After observing the class on Monday and Tuesday, I felt I was ready to start teaching on Wednesday (actually, I was itching to get started by then!)


The first part of the lesson was yesterday morning. I chose something fun and exciting for the kids to learn with- Jellybeans!





First we traced around our hands, and then we covered the surface area with jellybeans!







Then we traced around the jellybeans




and coloured them in so we could see how many jellybeans fit inside each hand print!


We then sorted the jellybeans into colours and made a bar graph depicting the number of each different colour jellybean!


Then we ranked each colour jellybean from least to most, on a scale using rope and paperclips!


It was so fun, and the kids were really engaged! Success!



Monday, March 21, 2011

Why Do We Need School

Saw this on Facebook- you have to laugh at it, even if the whole thing might be enough to do me out of a job when I finally become a proper teacher!



Why Do We Need School

Music: We have YouTube for that.
Sport: I have a Wii.
Languages: I watch Dora the Explorer.
English: Everything is shortened anyway (LOL, BRB).
Maths: That's why we have calculators.
Geography: I'll buy a globe (or use NavMan).
Drama: That's why I watch The Bold & The Beautiful.
History: They're all dead anyway!





Luckily I have a kindergarten class for my latest prac at school, and being so early in the year, they can't read yet... otherwise if they saw this, they might not turn up next week ;)


Thursday, March 10, 2011

My morning

This is my second week back at uni.

The second week of the last semester of the last year of my degree.

For those of you playing along at home, this marks Year Number FIVE for me and my university career.


Anyway, this morning.

This morning I rushed out the door with barely any makeup on and pulled back two bits of my hair from each side and clipped them up in an attempt to make it look "done".

It was eight minutes past seven, one minute later than I'd left yesterday morning. And yesterday morning had not worked out well. It took longer than the usual hour and a half to get to the campus, and I was ten minutes late to my first lecture.

So, makeup less with messy hair, I fly out to my car thinking "I am going to be late FOR SURE."

What happens? Of course, there's hardly any traffic. If you live in Sydney and ever have to drive anywhere in the early mornings, you will know what a MIRACLE this is!

I was so amazed! I breezed past exit ramp after exit ramp, thinking "I should be stopped in traffic by now... or by now... or at the very most, by NOW!"

Usually, it's a "good day" if you can make it five or ten minutes of driving without being blinded by a sea of red breaklights.

I had thirteen minutes of motorway heaven. I got on at 7:23am and actually drove at the speed limit until 7:36. (I know this because I kept tracking how long I'd been driving, since traffic was moving so unusually quickly)

I had thoughts of getting to uni early and coming in to the library to blog and kill time before my lecture.

But there is a reason I'm only writing this now at 11:32am.

Peak hour is called peak hour for a reason.

As expected, my highway bliss was rudely interrupted by traffic coming to a standstill. For no reason at all. It seems Sydney cars just get a kick out of exercising their break lights every once and a while.

My joy at actually driving along the highway - as opposed to the stop-start of a gridlocked Sydney road- was short lived.

I made it to the exit ramp right before the one I take, and then everything stopped. We crawled along for the next 20 minutes and then proceeded to drive very slowly all the way to the university campus.

But I was still early.

I could've taken time with my hair and makeup after all :)

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

So.

So. It has been almost a month since I last updated my little blog and I am feeling very ashamed about it.

And I don't even have anything to show you in return for your faithful reading! My camera cord has been lost misplaced and so I can't upload any photos for you all to see.

BUT. I have been busy. After getting back from Singapore in the middle of February, I was home for a total of seven days before I jetted off again.

This time to a much more freezing cold temperate climate than the steaming hot equatorial mass that the Singaporeans (and my dad) inhabit.

My cousin Ashley (we're 2 months and 1 day apart exactly) got married last weekend, and so Mum & I flew to Dunedin for her wedding. Dunedin, at the bottom of New Zealand's south island, is basically as close to Antarctica as you can get without travelling on one of those icebreaker ships.

Fittingly, as a welcome, the city decided it was be fun to start pouring rain right as we drove off from the airport. Thanks very much, New Zealand weather.

We spent our first afternoon acclimatising to the weather (me) and shopping like mad (Mum).
The next day we both headed out to do some shopping on the main street. After blazing through all the shops that the one shopping mall in town had, we met my Uncle Jeff at his work in the council chambers and had coffee and caught up on all the family news.

An hour later Mum & I were in a clothing store and stopped in our tracks to listen to the radio playing through the store's speakers. We knew there'd been an earthquake in NZ, but thought it was a relatively minor one, such as are common in the land of the long white cloud.

What stopped us right then and there, t-shirts in hand, was the words "there have been reports of deaths amongst the rubble".

Amidst the frivolousness of $20 t-shirts and $15 shorts, I felt a deep sense of "none of this stuff matters". Right there, in the shop, I felt silly for spending my entire day shopping for things that were really inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.

Four hours drive away, in a city I had visited many times, people were dead, dying, seriously injured, scared and trapped.

Four hours away families were scared and fearful for their loved ones in Christchurch's CBD.

Four hours away mothers ran barefoot for half an hour to check on their children at school.

Four hours away people in an office building had to resort to sliding down the outside of a building on a rope weighted only by the mass of another man.

Four hours away strangers banded together to physically peel off the roof of a car, only to find the driver hadn't survived.


All of this we watched on the 24/7 streaming news coverage that night, news coverage that ended up running for three days straight. If you haven't already seen pictures, the city looks like a warzone. It literally looks like someone has dropped a bomb into the centre of the city.

In the following days, Christchurch became the dominant topic of conversation. In cafes, book stores, supermarkets and pharmacies, you could almost always hear someone talking to someone else about the earthquake. Being the next largest city, almost everyone in Dunedin knows someone who lives or has lived in Christchurch. And so many of those people have had their homes or workplaces wrecked by the force of the quake that was struck so suddenly.

What was amazing to see was how New Zealand responded. Almost immediately, medical personnel were dispatched to the city. Ordinary citizens loaded up their cars and drove to help out. As supermarkets posted signs declaring they were out of milk, or bread, or toilet paper, or flour because of the situation in Christchurch, students organised for Dunedinites to make hundreds of packaged lunches, and shipped them to help feed rescue workers.

Being in New Zealand at the time of the earthquake was a little scary and disarming. But it was also amazing and very humbling. I didn't feel the earthquake (although I felt one aftershock in the middle of the night a few days later), but what I felt most was the compassion and empathy people had for those affected in Christchurch.

The world could do to take a page or two out of New Zealand's book.