Monday morning, back to school and back with the year 8s pop up book project. During their double lesson I had a meeting with my mentor, we discussed me doing a starter for one of Yazz’s year 7 classes this week and she showed me how to change the blades on some of the saws in the workshop. I spent Monday night putting together a worksheet for the year 7s as a starter. The worksheet is a picture of a workshop with lots of health and safety hazards going on, I want the students to circle the hazards.
Tuesday, Miss Milne the form tutor of the form I am with at Davenant was not in first thing so I had the form on my own for the first time. It is assembly for year 7s on a Tuesday so you are supposed to get them sat down in the form room and take the register before they walk over to the hall for assembly. I got to the room where the students where noisily waiting outside, the door was locked and I don’t have a key so I had to improvise, gain control of the form and take the register in the hallway, this went surprisingly well and was quite proud of myself. Whilst the students were in assembly all the year 7 form tutors were brought back to the staff room for a meeting as there was a year 7 parents evening on the Thursday. We were given sheets with student’s names on outlining those students’ special educational needs. We were advised we might need to check up on these with the parents on the Thursday.
Onto Yazz’s year 7 class. She told me to bring them in from outside and take the register, this way the students would see me as the teacher rather than her doing this then handing over to me. I explained what I wanted them to do for the first 10 minutes of the lesson before they got on with their practical. When handing out the sheers I had made I was explaining what I wanted them to do and told them they were welcome to discuss their answers as a group on their tables. I gave them 5 minutes to do this then asked students from each table to give me an example of a hazard they had circled and challenged them by asking why this was a hazard. The students did very well, Yazz and I both praised them then let them get on with making their boxes which they had started a few lesson ago. Yazz told them that after doing my worksheet there should be no excuses for poor health and safety in the workshop now.
Wednesday I decided to stay with Miss Milne, my form tutor, for first period so I could observe a Drama lesson as Drama was not a subject at my school and I was interested in how the subject is taught. Her first lesson this day however just happened to be our form group. Despite them already being in the classroom for form she made them go outside and line up as they would for any other lesson. They were quite disruptive for the start of the lesson and Miss Milne had to keep explaining that now she was no longer their form tutor she was their Drama teacher. The year 7s seems to have a hard time understanding this difference and acted very differently to how the would in any other lesson. They were working in groups on some drama pieces and had to perform short acts at the end of the lesson. They were very good, I was really impressed.
Thursday was spent in the conference room at the school as we had a day of SEN training. We covered Dyslexia, Autism and ADHD in great detail and were told about students in the school who are very high up on the scale of these and how to include them in lessons. Stemming from this we were given an in depth talk about Teachers Assistants, how vital they are to a classroom, how to make effective use of them and to make sure we include them in every part of a lesson. I know sometimes TA’s can be overlooked in classrooms; I have friends who have been TA’s so I know how hard they work for very little recognition. After school it was parents evening, after spending a couple of weeks with the year 7s in form in was really nice to meet their parents and let them know how well they were all settling into secondary school.
Friday as always was spent back at Goldsmiths and I was very pleased to be back having a session in the workshop. After spending a couple of sessions working with wood we moved onto metal. I don’t know too much about metal so found this workshop really helpful. We were first asked to make a tea light holder out of aluminium sheets. We cut the sheets to size using the notcher which cuts small notches out of the metal meaning your sheet stay straight whereas the guillotine which you could also use tends to slightly bend the sheet. After watching everyone use the notcher and seeing all the tiny scraps of aluminium just being dropped to the floor I had to ask Richard, the guy who runs the workshops, what happened to all the little scraps? After he gave us a 6 hour-long lecture on sustainability I was pleased to hear that they get swept up and melted down to be used for aluminium casting. We used Arba files to cut a hole out of the sheet for the candle to sit it then added a slight curve with the sheet bender and finally added feet with the box bender. A lot of stuff I had never used or even heard of before. We also got to use pop rivets to hold the parts that the candle will sit in together, I knew about pop riveting but had never physically done it before and my lack of strength meant I still nearly hadn’t but with a bit of help it worked. Later that day we were shown how to silver weld, again something I was aware of but had never tried.
I feel much more confident in my knowledge about metal now, shame the school I am currently at does not really work with it due to lack of funding, maybe I can put my knowledge into practise in my next placement.
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