Wednesday 21/05/08
Prac-Block Day Eight

Today I started with music. The teacher had the students attempt the challenging task of writing their own lyrics. She used stimuli for the students and once they had something basic allowed them to try to fit these to their chord patterns.

Next I had maths with D1. Most of the students except for a group of six started on their game design this lesson. The six played one more game. Some of them have now only played two games, but they will still start on their final task next lesson. Other students have finished their activities and tasks already, so I can imagine they will be playing games next lesson.

At morning tea, my prac liaison came around and spoke with all of the Griffith students. Some of the students are worried about their observations and how much feed back they are getting. I only asked about weather or not my maths teaching can count and she said that it would be good to put on a resume – that I can take other classes. So that’s good.

After morning tea we had maths with Boat E who were about the same as D1 except that I had everyone designing games and no one playing them any more. I’m not looking forward to organising Boat F on Friday. The majority of Boat F should be up to designing their games, but I suspect that many of them haven’t done enough work playing the games to be able to move onto that.

Finally we had Japanese. There was an ancient History test being held in the Languages room, so we were relocated. Many of the students didn’t come to Japanese today, because they had their Rich Tasks, and also because two of the Boats are on camp. We only had 6 students in total.

First we revised the hiragana alphabet that we learned last lesson. Sadly, the students had very little recollection of the hiragana alphabet characters and we had to reteach them. After this, my teacher showed the students a scaffold of how to write a paragraph describing the people in your family and then had the students use it to write their own paragraph.

The lesson finished with another revision of hiragana.

I have noticed that the principle takes it very personally when things happen in his school. At the staff meeting this afternoon, Danielle, the music teacher, asked the other teachers if a list of students had been in their classes in the morning. All of the students were in the dance group who had an eisteddfod that day and had been out of class practicing when they shouldn’t have been. On hearing this, the principle said he would have a quiet word with those students, but recognised that the students in question were ones with excellent reputations.