Thrown in the Deep End

This morning when I arrived at school, I discovered the teacher who's been supervising my prac was away, so there was a casual teacher there. When I explained that I was there on prac she said, 'That's great, you can teach the class then! You'll be a huge help, I've only ever taught Year 6 and high school'. I explained I was happy to help in whatever capacity but that last week I was mainly observing and helping individual students. So I ended up doing a fair bit more than I'd anticipated, but it ended up being fine. Enjoyed it on the whole.

Doing spelling with Year 3 proved interesting. I hadn't had a chance to look through the spelling words for the week and prepare anything before-hand, so I just had to wing it. We went through the words they weren't sure about, and one was 'avail'. How often do you use the word avail in a sentence? After they'd guessed what they thought it meant and kind of got it, I said, 'yep, so we could say something like I will avail myself to you', thinking as I was speaking. The year 3 boys all blushed and giggled away and I apologised and said that probably wasn't the best of examples. Then quickly moved on. How embarrassing! It was very funny though.

Reading groups was a bit of a disaster - I had to coordinate the groups, but stupidly hadn't thought about that before-hand either. Being a planner it kind of threw me. Anyway, we survived it. They got to see that teachers are humans too and they make mistakes.

This afternoon was the cross country so that just added to the complexity with a casual teacher who knew even less about what was going on. But we survived that too. I had to sit on the sidelines and coach the kids along when they got a stitch and remind them to stay inside the markers. Loved it when various kids came up to tell me how well they'd done when we went back to class, they were so excited, even to come 24th.

So I'm really loving teaching. Really grateful for the opportunity to be part of the class for two weeks, and to affirm my studies will be well worthwhile.