Hi,
I am currently doing my practicum and would just like to ask for advice and tips from experienced teachers. For example, what year do you teach? What routines work in your class? Do you have a set morning routine? For example, the children may unpack their stuff and then return outside to line up before entering the classroom? Teaching tips for narratives would be great. Anything advice would be very helpful.
Thanks heaps!
Check Bill Roger's strategies - lots of short Youtube videos + his books are a worthwhile addition to your collection of resources. He has lots of behaviour management techniques such tactical ignoring and dealing with distractions. One of the hardest things to learn as a teacher is how to deal with challenging behaviour. Too often young teachers (and also experienced teachers) loss their cool and find themselves in massive confrontations over relatively insignificant things. I wish that I had read more about Bill Rogers when I was a beginning teacher.
Tips for teaching narratives
1) Spend a lesson or two on interesting ways to start a story otherwise you will end up with 20 stories that begin with 'Once upon a time'. You can visit the school library and get students to write out a list of great first sentences to stories and discuss why they are good.
2) 'Show me don't tell me' Too often students will write very boring stories that are just an account of events (e.g. We played our soccer final. It was a close game but we won). Get students to write about their soccer final, but they can't just say it was a soccer final and it was close, they have to show you these elements through descriptive language.
3) Less is sometimes better. When students can write as much as they like, many will waffle on. What about a 25 or 50 word story - it can be done, and the results are often better as student really need to consider the words they choose.
i just graduated and have done 5 days crt. behaviour management is really hard. I found the clapping or the putting your hand up it would take them so long to respond especially when you start out in a new room. I saw one of the crt's have a bell and ring it loudly and all the kids would eventually look up and see what was going on.
Getting a gig in primary is extremely difficult.
Join up as many Facebook pages as you can find - Relief Teaching Ideas Community, Casual Teachers Association etc. They're a great place to get ideas. Join the TLN (Teacher Learning Network) and check out their online seminars that you can attend in real time or on demand.
I've only been teaching for a few months, but all of my data gathering has helped. However, I recognise I have a long way to go.
Routines work really well to settle students into the day. It doesn't really matter what the routine in, as long as it is consistent, as it allows the students to not only know the expectations of the teacher but also gives them a sense of familiarity which is important.
During 18 months as a relief teacher, I have seen many and varied routines, from prep through year 6. There are three that particularly stand out. Depending on the grade you could do all three.
There will be numerous other routines that you could choose, depending on the class. Usually you would not get them to line up again after putting their things away in the morning, unless the majority of them hadn't followed the morning routine, then you would explicitly teach it again until they had it down straight.
http://www.smartclassroommanagement.com is quite a good website. There are hundreds of different styles and in time you will find yours.
http://wholebrainteaching.com is another which uses an interesting way to get attention.
One of the school I frequent uses castanets to get attention. One click for stop, the next a few seconds later to look and the last a few seconds later to listen. Introduced in prep, it works extremely well across the whole school.
Being a pre-service teacher, everything can seem overwhelming at times, but it does get better and easier as you get to know more of what works and what doesn't.