The school I gained a position at was called Hermitage Primary up in Helensburgh. Each morning/afternoon I travelled a scenic 40 minute train ride along the coast. My class was a great wee class of P1 students (end of kindy/new entrants level). My class was in a open plan area with the option to close the door between our classes.
Every morning we began with Jolly Phonics and Active Learning (play based learning). I found Jolly Phonics relatively easy to teach as Yolanda Soryls phonics programme has aspects of it included (plus I had been introduced to it in Oman). Our Active Learning for the week would depend entirely on our topic. Children would split up into groups of 5 and complete simple tasks. For example The Post: programme a bee bot to deliver mail, design a airmail envelope to a country of choice, sort post from other classes and deliver, weigh and sort packages. These changed weekly and had topics such as Halloween, autumn, babies, Christmas, measurement and shape.
The first topic I was involved with was Our School and this was focused around the school and the people who help us (teachers, cleaners, cooks, lollipop ladies). We did activities such as mapping the school, identifying and interviewing the people in our school and because this was the first topic a lot of work around the rules at school.
Our next topic was the post shop and this was a great topic. We looked at the journey of a letter and how it gets from the sender to the receiver. The children all made a letter to someone else in the class and these were then put in envelopes. We organised a trip to the local sorting office who were great at taking the time to show the kids the process from arriving to being sent with the mail man. We then purchased some stamps and posted our letters from 4 different mail boxes 3/4 arrived the next day and 1 arrived a week later. During this topic we set up post boxes around school for other classes to send mail to each other (it worked out great with Christmas time and all the Christmas cards being sent)! Each day children would have to collect, sort and deliver the mail to each class which was great especially when they were dressed up in all the post gear.
During our post topic we were also super busy with Christmas play rehearsals. We decided to do a play called the Wriggly Nativity and it was awesome. Lots of hard work was put in by all and after all the practice and rehearsals the kids did an awesome job.
As a teacher we had to run a club during the term and my stage partner and I ran nature club together. We began by introducing the focus and gathering the students questions. From this we developed a rough programme of what we would cover each week.Our first session began with a bug hunt and it was awesome seeing the children getting their hands dirty and the language they used when hunting.
Over the few months I spent in Scotland I learnt so much. Their programmes differ slightly from New Zealands and I can see the benefits from both. I had a laugh when we started using these old school head phones!
