Excert from School P. Report

School P. Student Placement: 21.10.09

My day at School P. was inspiring, encouraging and awesome! 

Teacher N. was extremely welcoming and enthusiastic, and I found this to be true of the entire school as the day progressed.  In no other educational establishment have I come across such pleasant and friendly staff and pupils.

I felt completely comfortable being around the children.  There were a few particular traits that I was not sure how to respond to – certain levels of autism that I am unfamiliar with and do not know what the correct response should be, but generally the children’s reactions to me were so lovely that they made it easy.

The Creative and Media classes were to be with a supply teacher, and for health and safety reasons it seemed more appropriate for me to join other lessons.  I am very glad I did so because the C&M would have been on computers for three sessions, and instead I was able to join in with a wider range of classes and meet more of the children.  I observed ICT, RE, PE, drama and maths, as well as assembly.

In R.E. I was impressed that the pupils had reached the end of the ‘Ghandi’ film and felt that teacher A. was fantastic with helping them to understand some difficult concepts.  The varying levels of need in the class made this an admiral task and took some patience.  The maths lesson was also quite challenging to keep the pupils on task, but it was great to finish up with a game of UNO.  Boys that had been quite tricky to engage with during the lesson were teasing me as I lost, and it was really good fun!

However, the most amazing part of the day for me, was the drama lesson with year 7s.  Teacher J. is a fantastic teacher and I would have loved to have been able to go to all her classes to see how she teaches the different age groups.  In this particular lesson, the focus was on making eye contact (something I didn’t realise was quite so difficult for many children with special needs), and also being able to ‘lose’ (a game) without it being the end of the world.  In this lesson I witnessed the healing powers of drama, used to maximum effect, and I am left excited and inspired.