Week 4: Life Sciences after a long weekend!

No long weekend can prepare you for back to school. I felt so rested on Tuesday morning after the hectic week 3. Also, our Life Sciences mentor gave us off for Tuesday as she missed teaching her grade 10s. Thus it was just a day of babysitting and observations.  However, my colleagues and I are starting to talk to more and more teachers and as well as the other student teachers.

I only had Life Sciences this week. This week's focus was Ecosystems,  The Environment and Ecotourism. The learners seemed quite bored at the start but as the lessons progressed they found it interesting. There were many questions posed that one could not have prepared for however to my knowledge I tried to answer it as best as I possibly could and then I would ask the Life Sciences teacher if there was anything she would like to add.

The discipline and respect was much better this week. The learners seem much more comfortable and at times too comfortable.  I was told by my Life Sciences mentor the I have  very good interaction with the learners. This reflected in the way I treated them and their input during lessons. I try my best to incorporate a teacher and learner centred classroom environment in which all opinions matter and are respected. This week was the week in which I gave my grade 10s their first assessment activity.  However, time did not allow us to complete the activity in 1 period but two. Some learners did not complete the activity and asked to take it home. I then used my authority with reason and said no as it was not that difficult and in my experience, if you give learners activities to take home, there will always be one or two with an excuse of why he or she did not bring it back on the due date. Thus I will be marking it as is and handing it back so we can reflect and do corrections together. I added a new strategy this week. When I do my recap of previous lessons, I reward positive input as well as correct answers by giving a sweet. However, if no hand was risen to answer a question, and learners shouted out the answer, no sweet was given. It was interesting to see how many learners actually participated in this because normally it's always the same learners answering.

I attended both hockey practices this week again. However, on Wednesday it was raining but the players were so dedicated that they continued to play in the rain. Thursday they also wanted to continue planing in the rain but the couch refused nd we then moved to shelter and spoke about positions. We have been having hockey games every week now and I'm so proud of the girls they really are improving and it shows by the winnings.

Next week the PGCE evaluator is visiting the school. I'm soo stressed as to all the reflections after the observations which I still have to formally complete. I know that the reflections are helping us, but at times I feel that it's really taking up valuable time as we need to reflect on everything. I don't know if I'm the only one who feels this way and just have to handle my time management better but I'm really struggling keeping up with all of that.

Hope you all had a blessed week. Rest well the weekend!