I first became interested in primary teaching having my mother as example, she is a primary school teacher. This made me realise I enjoyed working with this age range, and school experience confirmed teaching as a career choice.My subsequent four-year BA Primary Education course at Highschool has served further to fire my enthusiasm and prepared me effectively to take responsibilityfor my own class. My degree has trained me to cover all National Curriculum subjects, and my subject specialisms are Design and Technology and English, with an elective in Drama. I have also studied Design and Technology at Subject Leader level. During my degree I have undertaken two practices in Key Stage 1 (Years 1/2 and 2) and afurther two in Key Stage 2 (Years …show more content…
An appropriate, balanced, challenging and creative curriculum is essential in developingchildren’s skills, knowledge and understanding. These all underpin personalised learning. I have in particular come to understand the value of sharing learning objectives and success criteria with children. Knowing exactly what is expected and how they can achieve allows children to focus more clearly on tasks. This also facilitates effective self and peer assessments, as there are clear criteria and objectives to assess against, encouraging children to take more responsibility for their own learning. Progression needs to be planned for, so that as children work and explore at their own pace,there is always something else ready to move them on and take them further in theirlearning. I also believe that differentiation and meeting varied learning styles are key toeffective teaching and learning. Work should be set at an appropriate, but challenging, level.When I prepare lessons I make a conscious effort to ensure I am not just catering for visuallearners like myself, but try to see lessons through other learners’ eyes. For example, tointroduce Year 2 children to pictograms, I got the children to create ‘human pictograms’arranged by name length, pets, eye colour, etc. and then transferred that information aspictograms to the board. Kinaesthetic learners were thereby catered for in the physicalmovement and manipulation, visual learners in the pictograms created on the board, andaudio learners as we discussed and interpreted the