T2 Week 6: ENGAGE face to face!

My reflection looks at the impact of being in lockdown for 7 weeks that has had on our students. The high level of engagement of learning from our Year 2 learners returning to school has been incredible. The children have increased their knowledge and understanding of story writing for meaning and this has included sight words as well as using correct punctuation. Some of the children were participating in an online daily journal during the lockdown period which I think has contributed to their overall literacy skills and comprehension of writing sentences. This rapid increase of language accumulation is significant due to the fact that only some of the children were continuing to read books such as (Sunshine online) from our Team 2 site that was less structured than core curriculum school subject areas such as Reading, Writing and Maths... My main focus throughout Week 6 was to carry out daily ENGAGE games with all of our Year 2 learners as a whole (approximately 40 children aged 6 - 7 years old). The session began with a simple relaxation breathing exercise (Pick a pretend flower from the garden and smell it with your nose, now breath in and out 3 times...). Then I introduced an ENGAGE game such as "Simon Says" and outlined the instructions before it started. All the children joined in enthusiastically and had lots of fun! They didn't mind missing out, or not being the winner and there were no issues of non-compliance. We didn't have any incidents of emotional outbursts or tantrums, and there were no behaviour challenges. These children have shown how resilient they are despite all of the upheaval and changing circumstances they have found themselves in due to COVID - 19. They have adapted well and coped with a change to their inside environment such as being seated in a new and different place and not physically touching anyone else! I feel that having this in place as a consistent approach became an expectation that the children became used to and therefore did not reject. After about 10 minutes the children were verbally disappointed to stop the games and continue with other learning in the day. I know that there have been other Junior teachers doing ENGAGE games with their Year 1 students in single cell classrooms, which I would like to collate data and reflections from as soon as possible. My only regret is that I completely forgot to ask another teacher to record this, which is what I aim to do in Week 7 (next week). Our children have shown so much resilience and adaptability of their environment, due to the fact that our Team 2 roll was only 50%, we decided to plan and teach collaboratively every day. Writing in the morning, followed by Reading and Maths after morning tea. The afternoon block was scheduled for Art/Science/PE sessions. My final thoughts are that children in "Our Space" have been happy, engaged in their learning and kept safe in their first week back at school.