Placement

I've now found out where my first 2 placements are going to be. The nursery placement (3 weeks, starting a week tomorrow) is in Coylton Primary Nursery and the P1-3 placement (Nov/Dec) is in Ochiltree Primary. They're close to each other, but in 2 different local authority areas, which will make looking at subjects like transitions quite interesting.

I'm getting quite excited about the nursery placement now. We're in the middle of 2 weeks where everything we do is specifically for Early Years. We've had visiting speakers, lectures and workshops. The only bit I'm struggling a little with is all the theory of child devleopment, etc - I think my brain just switches off when it hears the words psychology or sociology. And not being able to use my previous learning method of writing things over and over again is making it more challening to try to learn about all the different theories about learning and child development - Piaget, Vygotsky ......

The workshops on the other hand have been brilliant. Each afternoon we get a 2 hour workshop which is much more practical and is full of ideas for things we could do with children in the Early Years. So far we've had Drama, Music, Art, Social Subjects and PE - and we actually do activities, we don't just talk about them. I've set myself some interesting homework this weekend to help with preparation for the Early Years placements - I'm listening to CDs of nursery rhymes, singing games, action rhymes, etc. It's years since I heard most of them, but they're coming back to me now. We need to know these things, you know! It's lucky that Mum bought Steven some CDs a while back and 5 Little Speckled Frogs was on one, otherwise we would have struggled a lot with one of the challenges in the Social Subjects workshop! And in one task on Friday out of 30 in our class only 2 knew the story of the Bear Hunt so they had to do that task for us.