Work Experience in Scoil Naomh Brid

On the 7th of March 2011 it was my first day working in Scoil Naomh Brid. It was my old school so I was a bit nervous. Before I went to sleep on Sunday night I got everything ready meaning my clothes were laid out and I had my bag ready, so when I woke up I wouldn't be spending ages getting ready and wasting time looking for things. I got up at about 7:30 and I planned to meet up with Stephanie and Alison at 8:45 at the top of our estate. So I got ready and wore like a long black dress, flat shoes and a cardigan and was out the door by 8:45. We met Karen on the way as well, even though we did have to wait for her for like 10 minutes. We got there and made our way into the school where the new reception was. We spent a few minutes talking about how excited we were and then when the bell rang our old principal; Ms Pierce came over to us and started talking to us about what we would be doing. She put me and Alison with the senior infants, Stephanie was with first class and Karen was with the 2 junior infants. My teacher was Ms. Brady so I was happy because she was my actual teacher in senior infants, so it was nice being with her for the week because we already knew each other. The first thing she did was introduced me to the class and all the children were like "Hi Lauren..", she then told me to trace like wooden shapes and then cut them out. That took me about 2 hours because there was so many. We then had like lunch in the staff room but we had to leave our classes earlier than the other teachers. So we would get there about 10 minutes before the bell rang for lunch and we had to leave when the other teachers cam in because there was not enough room as it was for the actual teachers. After lunch Ms. Brady gave me about 20 pages that had small pictures that were jumbled up and the children would have to put them in the right order. These included Snow White and The ugly duckling, etc. I put so much effort into them because she said that she would laminate them so that she could keep them forever, as she says. Put by leaning hard on the pencils, I started to get tired and my hand got sore, so I decided to only go light on them. During the next few days I was still colouring the pictures, it literally took me about 4 days to finish them because there was so much detail in them. Ms. Brady would ask me to do other things like bring things to the office and help students with their work but I was mainly colouring at the back of the class. It was so funny because even though I was getting involved with the class by saying a prayer with them, I also had to dance with them because the children asked why wasn't I dancing with them, so I had to. :) I felt like i was a giant dancing with little midgets and they were all looking at me seeing how to like to the dance and I hadn't got a clue. On Tuesday it was Pancake Tuesday, so everything was all about pancakes, me and Alison were asked by my 5th class teacher to supervise her class while she took about 5 at a time down to the staff room to make pancakes. The power one has when supervising 11 year olds. :) Then after lunch I was asked by Sive a Junior Infants teacher; whose second name is unpronounceable, to help make and hand out pancakes to junior infants. We had about 4 packs of pancakes that had like 10 in each so we had plenty, the children would then form 2 lines where they would come up to either me or Sive and we would make them a pancake (my line was sooo much longer :] ) On Thursday I now had about 4 more pictures to do and I chose to laminate the ones that I had done already. When the page was laminated the picture that had about 5 small pictures, I then had to cut them out so they were like learning cards that Ms. Brady could show to the class. Later on in the day she then asked me to help the students paint a paper plate that had the centre cut out which was going to be used to make St. Patricks Day hats. That took hours!!! One by one the children came to the table at the back of the room where I was and put a t-shirt on over their uniform and got them to paint one side of the paper plate. I know they are 6 but they took so long to paint it and I sort of had to hurry them along so everyone got to do it. It was about 1 when I finally chose to do the last 15, 2 at a time, because they go home at 2. When everyone got theirs done I had to paint the other side of the 30 paper plates, so I just sort of quickly painted them and I got them all done in about 20 minutes. :L On Friday I was sad because it was my last day, throughout the whole day I was making paddy's day hats. I was using a sheet of green card which had been cut in half and trimmed at the end so when you folded it around a girls head it made the end bits stick out. I then put a green paper plate on it and then stapled it together, then the children had coloured in pictures of a shamrock and a buckle so I stapled them onto the hat and then some string to keep it on their heads. It took a lot of work and effort to put 30 of these things together. I didn't get to finish them all but the teacher said it was ok. After spending a week with my old teacher in my old school, has made me think about what I want to be when I'm older, a helper in a class not a teacher, I don't know how they do it day in day out. I wouldn't have the patience to be a teacher but I just wanna say thank to everyone who made us feel welcome and helped us throughout the week :)