Unit X | Educator Key Blog Post 1

From the educator programme so far, I feel that I have taken away so much more information that I thought I would have. I completely understand that not everyone or especially in this case ‘every child’, soaks in information the same way. From experience I found that I take in more information in a lesson if it is a fun lesson with a teacher that speaks on my level. So what I need to research further is what type of charisma I need to express when it comes to my turn of teaching, and also how I'm comfortable teaching to a group of children. I intend to gain this research from future experience in schools.

From the beginning of this year I found out that I had a specific form of learning difficulty which explained loads of unanswered question to why I couldn't take notes in lessons, why I drifted off in lectures, why I couldn't withhold information, why I had difficulty reading on my own. After Brian Frew explained the special needs a child has in learning, he mentioned that special needs doesn't necessarily mean disabled; it just means people that require extra time to understand/ learn. Or that they may need to be taught in a way that suits them. After numerous exercises on different types of learning, my favourite ones have to be the layout of the classroom on how tables and chairs are placed and also the freedom to doodle or make something while the teacher is teaching. Why these? Because I felt comfortable and felt a part of the group, we cold share our thought and ideas clearly.

Reflecting back on the moth making workshop, it was an eye opening experience and also felt like I went back in time to being a kid. The workshop was both enjoyable and a big learning curve to how we can interact with children in different age groups and how the interact with us as ‘teachers’.

During the dry runs before the workshop, as a whole group we demonstrated that we are able to problem solve and work as a team and also support each other. We didn't face to many issues as we had planned out who does what beforehand. When reflecting back on how the dry run went, we gave critical feedback an worked on them so that we can overlook it and avoid any awkward run ins. An example of this would have been that if we had 8 children at a station how would we cope with three captains? We planned that if such thing were to happen, we would take small groups of children each and give them our time and attention instead of a big group of different age groups and understanding.

The workshop turned out as planned with one or two children working at an extremely fast pace. To resolve this I came up of the idea of asking them how they could add other crafts to it and where they would place their moth, either the natural environment or the urban. This gave me a chance to connect with them and make them feel comfortable.