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Prompt 8

Prior to searching the ‘picturebooks’ hashtag, I had my doubts about the amount of resources that I would find. However I was pleasantly surprised when I saw the vastness of picture books that people had posted about.

One thing that struck out to me is that tumblr is now used as a form of advertising new picture books. New authors and illustrators, and even established publishing companies such as Harper Collins,  have used this platform in order to publish  news about their picture books to their followers. By being able to instantly publish these news, they have the opportunity to receive direct feedback through likes, re-blogs and comments. Additionally, the use of hashtags also helps expand their follower listing as new people can easily search the same hashtags and follow their blogs. Therefore, this allows them to instantly connect with their audiences at any time and acts as a good means of advertisement.

Furthermore, as a pre-service teacher I can use hashtags in order to find appropriate picture books to build my collection. Through my recent research, I was able to discover the ‘Leaf Litter’ by Rachel Tonkin which is a picture book that can help students understand biodiversity. Thus tumblr can be a very effective resource for teachers as it can direct us to a variety of picture books that we might not have previously known about. 

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Prompt 7

http://education.abc.net.au/home#!/digibook/2000107/how-to-build-stories 

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Prompt 6

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Prompt 5

What do you think the hands digging out of the ground symbolise? Where do you think is the setting of this cover? Which children are they referring to when they say 'Save the children'? How does the title relate to the illustrations? What emotions do the colours on the cover evoke for you?

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Prompt 4:

My third year placement was at a secondary school. This secondary school is located in a low socio-economic area with a lot of EAL students. Although my method wasn’t English I had the opportunity to observe and help out a year 7 reciprocal teaching classroom. The classroom was currently studying ‘Parvana’ by Debora Ellis. This novel was chosen as the teachers felt that majority of the students could relate to Parvana’s story in some way or another. In that period, the students were given an article relating to a women’s rights activist in Afghanistan and they were required to complete the ‘Predict, clarify, question and summarise’ task. The tables were set up in groups and each table had four laminated cards with explanations of ‘Predict’, ‘Clarify’ ‘Question’ and ‘Summarise’. At times students often struggled to think of inferential questions but eventually through sharing their thoughts and ideas with each other they were able to successfully think of some. Additionally, when a student would forget what they would need to write for ‘Summarise’ for example,  they would read the corresponding laminated card on their table. Overall I was very impressed with how the students were able to read the article and make sense of it on their own through completing those four steps.

Apart from observing and helping out that reciprocal teaching class, I was able to teach history to two year 7 classes and a year 9 class for two weeks. With the year 7 classes I faced a lot of challenging behaviours and I would put out a lot of effort and energy to get the students to listen and follow instructions. However during the second week I was able to slowly successfully manage and control their behaviour through closely following the school’s cooperation code (as seen on image on the top right hand corner ) and thereby creating my rules and expectations based off of it. I feel like despite the struggle that I faced with these two classes, it provided me with an enriching learning experience like no other placement has done before. I now feel confident with managing students’ challenging behaviours and I know the appropriate steps that I can take if it happens again in the future. Moreover, I extremely enjoyed teaching the year 9 class as they were always participating during classroom discussions and were always on task.

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Prompt 3

Transcript: 

As a teacher it is extremely important to understand your students’ handwritings in order to help them out and provide them with feedback on their work. However not all students are guaranteed to have neat and clear handwriting which makes it extremely difficult at times to read and understand.

Furthermore, parents put a lot of pressure on teachers to help their children improve their handwriting skills. Thus teachers are put on the spot and are expected to help students who are struggling. As teachers we need to take time and explain the importance of neat and clear hand writing to the whole class and then focus on those particular students who are struggling the most. We also need to give students constant feedback every time they show us their written work. Finally, I believe that parents should also help out their children by having them do more practice and checking their homework. Thus by providing students guidance at home and school they can begin to write more neatly.

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Prompt 2: 

This is a poster I would like to put up in my own future classroom. As a student I always found myself struggle to remember what nouns, verbs, adverbs & etc were. So I thought by putting together this poster it could be useful for those students who struggle in the same way as I did. Also by including visual aids it further helps students remember what a noun is. 

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Prompt 1: 

Transcript: 

In year 11 English, we all read Julius Caesar as a class. However at some points, our teacher would take the lead and read to us. Whenever he would read, the whole classroom would go silent as he captivated everyone’s attention with the tone of his voice. His reading was always clear and fluent and he made sure he was always expressive. He brought the text to life and helped us create an image of what the characters felt like just by utilising various tones and expressions in his voice. Through him reading to us I became more engaged and interested in the storyline. This helped me realise how powerful reading aloud can be and it inspired me to improve on my own reading as well. Thus I began to read more expressively and wanted to captivate people’s attention through reading aloud the same way he did with us.