My interventions

During the time I've been doing my practice I made several interventions in the class with which I learned so much, so I will comment in greater detail what I consider the most important and relevant issues for my learning. All my interventions were in the classroom where I spent most of the time in year 4.

First intervention:

At the beginning I did several small interventions, I explained some things to the children in the class and I did for example dictations or things like that in class, but on the second week on my placement my tutor told me to do a maths class.

I had a couple of days to prepare it, so after looking at several websites I decided to do the the following worksheet:

It is a sheet that deals with the measurement units and the course for which I selected was for 4th year. I choose it because it sounded interesting the idea of working with different trains, because it is a way to make the class different and interesting. As I explained in the structure of the classroom, the class is divided into 5 groups of 5 students each, so I took advantage of this distribution for the activity in groups, so I gave two copies of the sheet to each group to look at ; then I explained how to do the activity.

I suggested that they make a group competition, so the first thing I did was to tell them to elect a moderator and a spokesperson for the group; then I told them they had to work together and when everyone had finished we would correct all sections in the order the groups had finished first.

The truth is that not many had trouble performing the activities although I had to help a little, always without telling them the answer, trying to make them think so they could reach the solution. But they did have problems in teamwork, because some students are not capable of thinking that they can make a mistake and that other colleagues can be right or can help them, so I had to intervene several times to sort this out.

Overall the session went fine, all the children participated and the activity was taken very seriously. When I finished I felt very happy and looked forward to give more classes.

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Second intervention:

My second intervention was not of a particular subject, it was a session where I tried to teach them some culture and consciousness with the occasion of Peace Day was that week. As always I have given a class the children were very excited and attentive, I guess because I'm the new in the classroom and being younger than teachers they see me as someone closer to them.

To start I put them a video on the whiteboard called "Swing of Change". It is a silent video with a lot of importance of music. The video is set in New York in the 30's; we can see a barber in his barbershop where he only accepts white people, but thanks to the music he begins to accept black people in his local.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fXenaGc8e4

When we finished watching the video I did the students say what they had to say from the video and what ideas they had taken out of it. After several interventions I paused the video at a particular moment where you could read a poster that said "ONLY WHITE". At that point I started to talk about how things used to be for example in the USA; where black people could not go to the same places as whites, they did not have the same rights, etc.

They could not believe most of the things I told them; because they have not assimilated the concept of racism, I think also because they are in a school with many different nationalities and even in class there are two black students which according to the teacher she told me that in the four years they have been together they have never had any problems with the theme of skin color, something very positive.

We keep debating a while, I tried all participate, even those who rarely talk in the class; they all had good interventions and gave their point of view and were very good with the theme of speaking time. We had to finish the class because we ran out of time but I was looking forward to show them a video clip that had brought to show, so I told them that if they were well behaved at all other times before break time I would show it to them.

It was a rap music video called "Rap against racism"; I wanted to show it to the class because it is the kind of music that I like and I also had the same theme so well me  would know something else and because they had the same theme as the video. They really enjoyed it and were attentive to the lyrics. That ended my second intervention, which I was very pleased with and with many new ideas on topics that I would try in class.

Here I leave you the video clip:

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Third intervention:

My third intervention was slightly more improvised as it was that morning when my mentor suggested that I give the maths class because the children needed to strengthen this subject because the exam was the following week.

As I did not have much time to think what to do in the class I decided to use a similar sheet which I used in my first intervention because when I prepared the class I had photocopied two other sheets in case any problems arose.

This is the sheet I used:

The main difference between the first intervention and this was they did not do the activity in groups but had to do it individually, because when they worked in groups they had some problems and I don’t think that all of them participated equally and we wanted everyone to strengthen their knowledge so I decided to do it like this.

The activity went very well, I was helping everyone to understand and complete the activity, with particular support to two students who have reinforcement in math because they suspended the previous year so it costs them a little more to complete the sheet. As for the mentally retarded student the tutor gave her a sheet of a lower level and I also helped her.

When they finished the activity the students came to the blackboard to correct the activities and thereby resolve any doubts.