An enjoyable week and a good experience, but Primary isn't for me thanks!

Keeping track of the reading list. So far so good...

Since getting back home from Lancaster I have been finishing off my preparations for School Direct to get some bits and pieces out of the way before the end of the academic year.  I spent a few days in the MFL department of my old Secondary school and I also went and met all the other trainees studying via the same university and training with the same lead school.  It was really good to finally get to meet people and gives me some faces to look out for at the summer school in August.  It also started to paint a slightly clearer picture of how the year is going to work.  It seems that one day a week will be spent training at one of the schools in the consortium and 6 of these days might be a little further afield depending on our subjects. Looking forward to the summer school now as hopefully we'll get information about how it's all going to work in terms of assignments and second placements.  My few days in Secondary were good too as I got to see all years, except for 11 and 13 of course, and saw a variety of lessons which gave me ideas for September.

As part of the preparations set out by my university I had to spend a week in a Primary school. Unfortunately the last few weeks of the Summer term are not the best for getting into classrooms and seeing lessons going on.  Due to the timing with the end of term I only spent one day with year 6 but two days with year 1 and year 3.  Despite the fact that curriculum teaching has pretty much ended in year 6 I was able to spend a day with them and spent some time asking the teachers about some of the questions I needed to answer including covering the transition to Secondary school.  As part of these investigations we were supposed to focus on our specialist subjects but I soon realised I wouldn't be getting the opportunity to see any languages teaching.  The school I visited used to have a specialist but they don't any longer and now they use a piece of computer software to teach French.  I enjoyed my week in a Primary school but I couldn't do it all the time.  The kids were great and it was a lot of fun but I think that was helped by the knowledge that I'd be done at the end of the week and not coming back!  All the Primary teachers said to me that they wouldn't be able to do Secondary though so I guess it just comes down to personal preference.

Now that everything has calmed down I've got to get on with my reading, I was hoping to have the bulk done before going to Canterbury but I'm not convinced that is going to happen now!  I'm back up to Lancaster later in the week for my Graduation ceremony and then thats it, I'm no longer a Lancaster undergraduate student!