Week 1 Summarised!

The first week of school went really quickly. I had no teaching responsibilities on Monday, but I started with half days on Tuesday. The kids were very impressed that I almost had all of their names down by the end of day 1. On Tuesday I taught an English lesson on recounts and had my first lot of marking to do. Some of the holiday recounts were pretty graphic… one child described how he had gone pigging and the dogs had ripped apart one of the pigs. Country kids are funny.

I taught money maths and Indigenous studies for the rest of the week. Some days were better than others. The kids are very talkative and earned several detentions for their bad manners. It’s strange to be completely in charge of classroom discipline. On my previous pracs, my supervising teacher would step in and help with classroom management. Joel (my mentor teacher) lets me manage on my own. It’s a great experience, but sometimes difficult. Sometimes I find it hard to think of appropriate consequences for misbehaviour.  

My teaching space is pretty well resourced for a little country school. I have an interactive whiteboard and data projector, a whiteboard, a blackboard and a DVD/VCR player. The kids are seated in rows facing the whiteboard; we’ve already moved two of them since Monday for talking and distracting others. One huge downside of my classroom is that it is a shared teaching space. The 3/4 teacher shares our room and is only separated from us by a few bookshelves. When I am teaching, I can hear her and her kids talking. I think my kids figure that I won’t notice them talking when the class over the bookshelf is noisy!

My classroom!

The school day is broken up into four 70 minute periods. On a normal day we have Writing, Reading Groups, Maths and then some sort of SOSE/Science/Arts/PE lesson in the afternoon. My area of special responsibility during the internship is the SOSE unit. I have written the work program and the assessment, and will be in charge of writing their final SOSE reports.

On Thursday afternoon the weather changed from hot and dry to stormy. It rained all day Friday so we were stuck inside with the kids for wet weather lunches. L Cooped up kids get pretty silly… it was nice to send them home at the end of the day. Friday evening it rained so heavily and steadily that Erin (the other prac student living with me) and I joked that our house would float away in the night. When I woke up this morning the school oval (which can be seen from our house) had a series of lakes across it and the ditches by the side of the roads were flowing with water. Apparently when it rains out here, the roads flood between Tara and Dalby because the creeks run so rarely that they don’t build the bridges high enough.

Flooding in the drains and on the school oval.

There are little lakes of water sitting under the house now from the rain yesterday… perfect breeding grounds for the mozzies. Now the mozzies out here are really really bad! Not only are they the size of fat black flies, but they come in swarms the minute you set foot outside. I learned very quickly that if you are going to wear short sleeves/pants, then you must also wear enough insect repellent to keep a small army at bay. The mozzies bites that I got during my first couple days didn’t stop itching until yesterday.

Well, our house has a little more furniture now than when we first arrived. We now have a big screen TV sitting on the living room floor, a bookshelf and a set of scary old couches. Sadly no table and chairs yet… I’ll keep you posted. The TV was the first item of furniture to arrive. Apparently they thought it was the most important. It attracts many little black bugs at night and we wake up to find them all dead on the floor the next morning. We watch the Commonwealth games in the evenings… go Australia. The couches arrived on Tuesday while we were at school. They are ok… but they look like someone set their cat loose on them… they are pretty shredded up in parts. The bookshelf was a donation from a couple other young teachers out here for a 10 week contract. They took pity on our furniture-less state and pushed the bookshelf down the street to our house on the back of a skateboard one evening. So here we are, all set up in our house at

64 Binnie St

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64 Binnie St... feel free to send stuff!!! :D

My room... complete with bedsheet curtains...

This morning we did a round of the shops in the main street. The lady in the discount store is the mother of Erin’s supervising teacher, and the kids working in the news agent and the Foodworks are high school students from school. The people are very friendly here though, I love it!

Me at the school.

The main street in Tara.

I should get down to planning for my Saturday afternoon. I’ll be teaching a lot more this week… working my way up to a full teaching load by the end of week 3.

More to come… J