A day of freedom

Week 2 of 6 is now over, as we are at Uni for one day's break tomorrow. It's such a treat not to have to get up at 6!!!
The week has been up and down. The weekend had been lovely doing a flute concert in East Horndon, but Sunday rapidly became miserable as I tried to get my weekly planning done. Literacy is soooooo hard to plan for, especially as I don't get this new framework we have to use now. Nobody has sat down and shown us properly how to use the old one, let alone the new one.
Well anyway, my reflection for the week is that I am pitching my Literacy way too high and expecting far too much of my 6-7 year olds. My tutor came to school on Tuesday and was very nice, helpful and constructive about what was frankly a disasterous ICT lesson. I sooo understand why our ICT tutor told us people hate teaching the Control part of the ICT curriculum as it is manic! Most of my lessons have felt quite disasterous and my timing is still quite bad, my explanation needs honing, my EAL support needs working on, (always over-running) but I have more confidence now than I did on Tuesday.

Today I played piano for KS2 assembly as we have Edwardian day on Tuesday and they have to sing 'God save the King' (and Jerusalem and Land of Hope and Glory), which started being a bit scary, and I somehow ended up offering to teach the 200 children to sing it, and managed to teach them by singing it in bite sized chunks in 10mins! I felt absolutely fearless doing it. It was a lovely feeling!
I also taught a manic literacy lesson, messy but fun content in Science and had a slow worm making a visit. Problem solving in Maths was a nightmare, teaching the seaside song was fab. My class were vile most of the day, so was somewhat in a bad mood. Did anyone find on PGCE, I just find it hard to be in the KS1 classroom on my own without a TA when trying to teach differentiated literacy and numeracy, it's a nightmare. The lower attainers just don't to be able to do anything on their own, but the 2nd to bottom group can't either, and then the poor top 3 groups have barely enough time with me.

This weekend I am playing one of solo recorder parts for Brandenburg 4 in Felsted, which should be exciting. Must get practising...