Teaching Placement - Ideas

Ferris_Bueller

Hello all,

I'm a current PME student (primary teaching with Hibernia), just starting my second year. In two weeks time I have my second stint of teaching placement starting. I found the first placement really stressful and am already feeling the stress levels rising in anticipation of this placement again.

On the first placement and in the bits of subbing I have been doing, I don't feel nervous in the classroom itself, I am comfortable in front of the class and feel good at dealing with the children and okay at teaching lessons (obviously room for improvement), but I really struggle to think of ideas of what to teach, particularly in the core subjects (English, Irish, Maths). When I have been subbing it has always gone well as there is work left for the class and I have been able to teach/manage the class okay, but with placement the whole planning aspect is what I struggle with.

An example of what I mean from the last placement (I had 6th class), if I was to teach a reading lesson for example I found it really hard to know where to get suitable reading comprehensions or materials for the class? As a student I don't have any of my own books/resources really built up and we are told not to use textbooks. This time around I have senior infants and again, it is hard to know where to find resources or to get ideas for what to cover in a lesson. Does anyone have any tips or suggestions? How do others find this when they are qualified as a teacher?

Riquelme

Obviously when you are qualified you can rely on a core reader/text book more. However as you said on placement they like you to stray away from conventional text book teaching.

For senior infants, resources and concrete materials will be everything. Seeing as it is placement, that'll be even truer.

Your reading will consist a lot of phonics work. Jolly Phonics is a great programme and is very interactive. Most schools use it. A lot of books for infants can be found on PDFs/PPTs. Try and find a story/text that you can integrate across the curriculum. For example find a story about Halloween/ghosts/witches so you can link it with art/drama/Oíche Shamhna/SESE. Don't be afraid to ask the class teacher for suggestions, they were in your shoes once too. There might be things like Literacy Lift Off going on which are great to get used to as a student teacher.

Maths will have to be concrete materials based. Regardless of your topic there will be endless resources you can use in Maths. Maths is actually very handy to teach for that age group. Seeing as it is the start of the year there should be a lot of topics for you to choose from. Things like Measures and Shape and Space are handy ones for placement.

Irish can be a little trickier but again for infants, concrete materials is your saver. If you were teaching éadaí, bring in a bag of real clothes, fire up a makeshift clothes line and use that. For bia bring in food and make a shop. You get the idea. Lots of games, drama and repetition. Teaching Irish to infants is x2 as fun and easy than older classes I find as they still have some grá for the subject. Depending on the class teacher/school they might use one of those modern interactive Irish programmes which are fantastic. They have stories, vocab, games and songs all included. Hopefully they can become available for all class groups.

When I was a student teacher, Facebook groups were huge and people used to share lesson plans and resources although I often made my own like making my own Powerpoints and Interactive games. I am not sure if that is the case any more seeing as everyone has gone all private with social media now. I'd imagine those groups still exist though and still have lots of files in them.

Don't be afraid to ask other teachers for suggestions and ideas. You might feel like you're annoying them but you're a new teacher and you're supposed to. I did my DIP last year and I feel like I'm asking more questions and feeling like a useless idiot this year more than last year.

Postgrad10

There’s a forum on education posts for primary teachers to share ideas. Might be worth a look or posting there for advice.