# data[].attributes.body
What an incredible start to my next block of placements. I have been given many unforgettable opportunities that has allowed me to experience teaching as it is. I am in a mixed call of nursery, reception and year 1 which has been a very challenging yet rewarding experience. This placement has made me truly reflect on how important being organised is as a teacher and also how important having back up plans such as filler activities is to ensure the lesson runs smoothly. I have noticed children really like to be presented with challenges rather than doing the same type of thing every day. Recapping old knowledge is really important especially in the early years settings. I feel that there is not enough of this in my school. I would really like to implement this for the next few weeks to come.

During my next few weeks, I would like to look at the transition from reception to early years and have a few conversations around this and how it is implemented in a mixed class.

# data[].attributes.body
Wow, what a day. I have so many thoughts I am struggling to digest all the information I have received today. I listened to so many inspirational people who have achieved some amazing things in their life.

The first talk was by a lady called Kelly Davis who is a lecturer for the PGCE course. We covered the topic of Social Justice and Exclusion which encaptured and engaged me in a way I did not think possible. We talked about ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) and that we need to understand why a child is acting a specific way. I was shocked at the statistics that the most common reason children get excluded from mainstream education is behaviour disruptions. Surely this is something that we as educators should be able to overcome. Kelly stated that she believes that exclusion is a bad thing and many children that are excluded will struggle to return to a mainstream educational setting. We put ourselves in the shoes of the children - they are being told indirectly that they do not belong here (school) and that we cannot help them. These children are going to internalise this and believe that they do not belong anywhere and may become reserved or compensate this sense of not belonging in disruptive behaviour. Children who display disruptive behaviour are often labelled or identified by their behaviour rather than them being an actual human being.

Often children excluded often have ACEs and therefore there are underlying issues that cause them to behave in a way that unfortunately means they will be excluded. Your background still determines your future.  Children cannot control their background. Why are we as educators not helping these children? I felt extremely angry when hearing all the statistics of children being excluded. On reflection I also feel guilty - in an ideal world, we as teachers would be helping these children on a one to one basis but we don't have the time nor the resources to do this. We also have 29 other children to focus on. If that child is being disruptive to the other children's education it is not fair on the other children. How can this be resolved? By removing the child. But as we have seen above, this will not solve this issue long term and could result in permanent exclusion. Kelly briefly talked about what could be done long term. Building up good relationships with these children is important. Understanding their issues and celebrate any achievements. Be their champion.

I still have so many questions about why we are excluding so many children. On average we are excluding 8,500 children per year and the main cause is disruptive behaviour. We should be helping these children not dismissing them.

Next was a talk from the Alternative Complementary Education (ACE) School in Plymouth on managing challenging behaviour. This schools is an Alternative Provision (AP) School - the AP schools replaced the Pupil Referral Unit (PRU). They described their school as a last stop for children in education. This was a bold statement that did not really sit well for me. However, they described some extremely harrowing stories about children who have internalised societies view of them and is one of the precipitating factors of why they are in an AP school. There are still a lot of thoughts going through my mind from today and concepts that are still buzzing around my mind.

We talked briefly about social models and how we as humans generally function in friendship or even school groups. First we Storm, then we Form and finally we Norm. We first hit a storm - this is where everyones personalities are being shown and all thrown together in a storm. Next we form - these personalities all form together in a social group and then we norm - the unwritten rules of friendship or just companionship is formed. In the case of the ACE School - there is constantly new pupils being referred and therefore they are constantly in a storm environment. This in itself is hard for children to settle and therefore may struggle to function in the setting.

We talked about the reasoning for poor behaviour but mainly we focused on what the behaviour is trying to tell us. All behaviour is a form of communication. I think this statement is powerful -  no matter how badly behaved a child is being, they are communicating to you. This could be anger, frustration or lack of understanding but it is important for you to always remember that children are trying to communicate with you. If children are displaying challenging behaviour, give them time to cool off, give them time to vent but talk to them, communicate with them. Do not react in the moment if they are not causing harm to themselves or others. Talk to them and understand their background. 93% of communication is through haptics, proxemics and body language. Make sure you are thinking about this when talking to a child or not talking - always think about how you are presenting yourself.

A key message that was threaded throughout this talk was that building positive relationships is essential to managing challenging behaviour. You can do this through meeting and greeting children in the morning, using their name, showing them you are glad to see them and treating every lesson like its a fresh start. Praising positive behaviour is important - a phone call home could make all the difference to their behaviour in class but it also causes you to build good and strong relationships with parents are carers at home which is very benefical to both the school and the child. Consistency is key - do not keep saying 'this is your last chance' or constantly give out warnings as this can confuse pupils and the lines can become blurred for them. They then feel confused when they are permenantly excluded. When giving feedback to pupils - connect rather than correct. Connect with them, give them praise rather than constantly correcting their wrong answers. Remember you are their role model.

We then moved on to Human Rights and how we can encorperate this into education. Again, I learnt alot about this and the importance of teaching children their human rights. Children are part of this world to and they deserve a say. We talked about about human rights and what it means to be a human but the most valuable discussion I believe we had was that in the Decleration of Human Rights it states that 'Human Rights belong to all people regardless of their race, sex etc.....'. It goes on to list many other qualities. But why are we saying Human Rights belong to all people. Surely we should not be saying regardless - we are all people no matter what our qualities are. When giving people labels, we are classifying people which can lead to more problems. The minuite you start categorising people you limit yourself for the future. An example of this is children with undiagnosed SEN - children cannot move forward witht their education unless they have been diagnosed and labelled. I have often heard phrases being used in educational settings such as 'we are waiting for them to be assessed' or 'we are waiting for their EHCP plan'.

We then got introduced to Rights Respecting Schools. These are schools that UNICEF work with to enforce and educate children in their rights as a human. We got together in groups to discuss how we could implement this into schools. We came up with the idea of allowing child led debates about current issues.

# data[].attributes.body
The unconscious bias and racism in education and society.

What an inspirational talk. We had Ruhaina and Nick Alford come in to talk to us about the unconscious bias. Ruh is a muslim, brown individual who has experienced first hand bias both in education and in the wider society. We had some really thought provoking discussions around what terms are acceptable and which are not. I have always found it hard to know what terms are acceptable to say and what are not. Over the years, I have grown in confidence to ask individuals if what I am saying to or about them is correct. Ruh pointed out that a term is deemed offensive if the term has derived from a place of hate or negative history. For example, the term coloured is not an acceptable term to use as this comes from a time in history where people were insulted with the term coloured. The same goes with the term 'pikey'. This comes from hatred and used as an insult therefore is not an acceptable term to use. Thinking about this however the term black was used in a derogatory way and is now accepted so doesn't really help me in trying to decided what terms are acceptable and which are not. We discussed the term 'brown' and how some people are advocating this term as mixed race. It was really interesting to have discussions around this but it also made me feel very uncomfortable which I was told is ok!

Another rich discussion we had was around complicated or unusual names in the classroom that either you as the teacher struggled to pronounce or children struggle to pronounce the teachers name. A suggestion for a new class was that you incorporate a game so all children say their own name and therefore you as a teacher can understand how it is pronounced. By doing this you are not singling out any individuals and all children feel valued. On the flip side, it was suggested that if children cannot pronounce a complicated teachers name, to encourage it and practice it rather than shorten it as everyone should feel valued and their name shouldn't be diminished to a single letter like Mr. P. However this is down to teacher preference.

The main theme of the lecture was unconscious bias. Everyone has an unconscious bias whether they like it or not, comments such as 'she is beautiful with her fair skin' favours white people over black people thus resulting in an unconscious bias. An unconscious bias also means that people are afraid of the hidden attitudes of people. You never really hear people being verbally racist or even maybe act racist any more but there is still that unconscious bias which has been engrained in us and is part of our evolution. My question is whether we will ever get to a stage where unconscious bias is not a thing?

We as teachers have the power and the ability to shape these individuals and can only hope that over time this will eventually bleed itself out of society. Some interesting ways that you can do this through education is teaching history in an inclusive and holistic way. Rather than teaching about the main, sterotypical victorians and world wars encorperate black history into it as well and were there any significant individuals who made an impact? There was a discussion around whether black history month should be a thing - surely we should be integrating this naturally into the curriculum rather that assigning it a specific month? Reading books that represent other nationalities and cultures but that do not make that the main focus of the stories. If there is lack of diversity in your school, surely this means there is a greater importance to teach it and expose children to this so it becomes usual.

Some further research I would like to do is around the hidden history and the new Welsh curriculum. I want to research culture capital further - what is that and what does it mean? We also got shown a very powerful image of equality rather than equity. I would like to explore this further and see how this fits into education.

# data[].attributes.body
Children and Staff Wellbeing

This has been a really interesting day focusing on Children and Staffs mental wellbeing. The speaker was a year 6 teacher from St Andrews School who is the mental health lead for her school. It was really interesting to see the kind of things you can implement in the classroom. Ideas included:
- Displays
- Schools Ethos and Values (Resilience, Community etc.)
- Find children's passions and create displays and activities around that. Some children in her class are passionate about the environment - organise a litter pick or create something around recycling.
- Value diversity - EAL children - ask them to introduce one word a week in their first language to the children. Have a multi-cultural week and each class has their own country. Could create markets with lots of their countries food and activities.
- Creating a 'quiet' area - this could incorporate in the reading corner. The year 6 classroom has a little 'coffee shop' for a more grown up effect.
- Choose stories based on current issues in the classroom/ childrens home life.
- Reflection area. Have a worry monster/bin where children can reflect or write down their worries, this can be anonymous or they can put their name on.
- Gonoodle - Yoga based on theme
- Free writing and free doodle books for children that are not marked but a place they can be themselves.

For both staff and children the wellbeing lead would put together a wellbeing theme for the week. This would be a weekly email sent out and it would include things the children could do and things the staff could do around that theme - for example themes could include - positive thinking, trying new things, positive affirmations, connecting with others.

The teacher also introduced us to a very interesting analogy around a balloon. The teacher held a balloon and talked about all the little stresses she had experienced that morning and with every stress pumped up the balloon. She explained that if we do not release these stresses (the air in the balloon) we will pop. This is a very interesting way to explain stresses to younger children.

Some interesting things I would like to research further into is:
- Zones of regulation
- Neuro-linguistic Programming - there are three cognitive states - Stress, Flow and DMN for a balanced brain.
- Unique voice in the community which is a charity.

In the afternoon we created our classroom resource to be shown on Friday. We created a worry monster with the idea being that children can deposit their worries into the box and can forget about them. We talked about children making their own individual worry monsters that they can keep on their desks but also a classroom one that could be kept in the reflection zone of the classroom. After we had created this, we did some free art and explored with materials I had never used before such as charcoal. Reflecting on this, I can see how therapeutic it can be for both adults and children. Just sitting there, doodling and chatting made me feel very relaxed and in tune with myself and I can see how this could help children mental health and wellbeing. By not marking their art or there being no expectation to produce anything exceptional, it gives children a chance to express themselves in a non-judgemental way.

# data[].attributes.body
Placement meeting - There was a lot of information around placement and the tasks we have to do. I am slightly worried I will get overwhelmed but I am trying to keep a positive mindset. I would like to ensure I am very well prepared for placement ensuring I have to do lists everyday and making sure all of my resources are ready the night before.

I am adamant that this to work and I want to do my best and prove that I can do this for myself. I will be a great teacher but I need to ensure I am organised for that first day and I have everything I need to make a positive impact.

# data[].attributes.body
I am proud. Today I went to my placement to volunteer and I started to have a panic attack. I managed to overcome this and carry on with the day - this is a huge step for me in proving that I can do what I set my mind to.

I had a really insightful conversation with my placement teacher and the TA about a recent trip they took to another local primary school to see how they teach maths. The teacher showed me that the school puts together a SMART presentation for the whole topic - one presentation for the whole term so they can recap the previous lesson easily or move on. The example was of a reception class and they were learning their numbers. The lesson would start with the children counting from 1 - 30. Then they would focus on one number for 2 weeks. The example was of the number 6, the first week they focus on understanding the number, and the following week they look at subitizing and counting to that number. The children look at how they can make the number six so 1+5, 2+4, and so on. They incorporate different modes of making the number so they use numericon and number blocks etc. The continuous provision put out is all based on the number 6 and literature or books they read should be on the number 6.

I also listened to some readers and managed to complete the whole class which my class teacher was impressed with. I also got told I was going to be in charge of VIPERS which is a shared reading comprehension task. I need to research this a bit more so I have more of an understanding of this.

Another interesting conversation I had with the EYFS/ Reception lead is that they have to read 5 books per day, this can include poems which is shorter but she let me know they are currently playing catch up. Something I would like to look more into is the EYFS framework and familiarise myself with this a lot more.

Uni-wise - I have submitted all of my assignments which is good so now I can fully focus on my research for my round table assignment and my placement. Tomorrow I have a placement meeting so hopefully, my tasks and what I need to do for my placement will become clearer.