Education begins the gentleman

Performance seems to be a really motivating factor for the children - we've had quite a few different kinds this week.

The school has decided to go in for the BBC Off By Heart competition, so last week's homework was to learn one of the pieces of poetry and we listened to them in Louises Literacy lesson on Wednesday. I was really surprised by the level of effort and participation the kids put in - they know that someone from our class will go forward to the colour area assembly to recite their poem and everyone, even the kids who're normally reluctant, did a really good effort, with expression and actions and in some cases, props! I just wouldn't necessarily have expected them to engage so strongly, but the chance to show it to others obviously seemed to make a difference.

In my literacy lessons, we're working in groups on writing our own anti-bullying play to perform, and again, they've mostly got really engaged with it. The groups are mixed ability so those who find writing difficult can delegate that to other members of the group and let their ideas roam free, which is working really well. There's only one group who've not really knuckled down and got engaged with the task, which over all, I'm quite pleased with - there were two or three that I was keeping an eye on but mostly they're into it, which is great.

The downside is that group work and rehersal are difficult to manage because of noise levels and space. When we have an LSA, I sent one group out to work in the wet area with her support and that made quite a bit of difference in terms of rehersal space but the noise is still quite high just because of the necessary discussion. I think it's partly that this group of children have very high volume by default, but it does feel kind of exhausting, even when most of the talk is on task! I've been reminding them to be considerate of the other people in the room, which does keep it a bit under control, but I don't think it would be easy to do this kind of lesson with children much younger than this.

It'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.