Crowd control
Nov. 14th, 2008 05:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
start_to_finishIt's interesting how much the amount of activity really makes a difference to children. I hadn't really thought about it much before* but this week we had 2.5 wet play days and due to school photographs, etc we missed our game session in my class and as a result, by Friday afternoon, the kids were so noisy and fractious that we nearly had to stop the science lesson dead. Unfortunately, it was raining so we couldn't take them out for 5 minutes of star jumps or anything like that, which seemed to be what they needed, but we muddled through in the end. I wouldn't have realised how much of a concrete effect the chance for physical activity seems to have on the kids, and it's not just the obvious energetic ones either - even the normally low activity ones were getting antsy.
The same lesson in minature came through in a couple of lessons I taught this week where we had so much to do on the carpet that towards the end I kind of lost them, which is tricky. One was Remembrance day where we had 5 minutes before the silence where we talked about what it was for, etc, then the silence, then the whole normal lesson so we must have been on the carpet around 20-25 minutes, which was too long. I should have re-jigged the plan when I realised, but hey ho, lesson learned, hopefully.
Same with Year 2 - we ended up having such an interesting discussion about which of our five senses we'd do without that the carpet session got really dragged out and by the end they were getting really fidgetty and silly. Well, not too bad, but I could see that it would have worked much better if I'd kept the first bit snappy. We went out to play after that, which was good - got it all out of their system. That was a tricky lesson anyway because I don't know the class very well and it's much more difficult to keep the outliers in with the pack if you can't call them by name.
* except in remembering my dislike of misc P.E. - I liked games with a point which were non-contact (actually rather than theoretically) and where I could kind of do it (e.g. rounders) and that was about it - and the fact that I used to prefer to sit and read at break times mostly.
The same lesson in minature came through in a couple of lessons I taught this week where we had so much to do on the carpet that towards the end I kind of lost them, which is tricky. One was Remembrance day where we had 5 minutes before the silence where we talked about what it was for, etc, then the silence, then the whole normal lesson so we must have been on the carpet around 20-25 minutes, which was too long. I should have re-jigged the plan when I realised, but hey ho, lesson learned, hopefully.
Same with Year 2 - we ended up having such an interesting discussion about which of our five senses we'd do without that the carpet session got really dragged out and by the end they were getting really fidgetty and silly. Well, not too bad, but I could see that it would have worked much better if I'd kept the first bit snappy. We went out to play after that, which was good - got it all out of their system. That was a tricky lesson anyway because I don't know the class very well and it's much more difficult to keep the outliers in with the pack if you can't call them by name.
* except in remembering my dislike of misc P.E. - I liked games with a point which were non-contact (actually rather than theoretically) and where I could kind of do it (e.g. rounders) and that was about it - and the fact that I used to prefer to sit and read at break times mostly.