Organsiation

[Guest]

I work in reception with another teacher and 45 children and have done since September. We share a room and get on very well together. However we are still working on how we should work together and wondered if anyone can share their experiences of how they run things.

 

We would really like to work as one and share planning, divide it up so that we arn't both planning everything seperately. wE have started to twick things but we are still unsure how to organise and run the day etc. wE keep thinking about it and have come to the coclusion that we would like some fresh ideas from different people.

 

Any advice would be great

[Susan]

If you are both buying into this it sounds like an excellent idea. I would try and work on a "high scope type" approach where you tell the children what is on offer and they go ahead and plan what they are going to do. Then as teachers you plan your teaching focus together for your groups and your continuous provision etc is adapted to reflect what you see the children doing.

 

Good luck.

[Guest]

We have started working as a whole reception team this year. We have 52 teachers, 2 teachers, 2 full time assistants and then a special needs assistant until 11.30 in the mornings and then for an hour in the afternoon. We are lucky in that the special needs child is for speech and language so does not need the assistant with her constantly. We have a timetable split into 5 columns, 1 for each adult and it shows what we are each doing and with which groups when appropriate. We always have an adult outside, then sometimes we are doing a teacher directed activity, other times we are timetabled in to observe or spend time in an area to enhance it/play with the children. When the children are not involved in a teacher directed activity they are involved in continuous provision. As far as we are concerned it seems to be going really well and we've never had such a happy bunch of kids. We are constantly tweaking things to improve it as we're only 6 months down the line but if you are in the same room I would certainly advise this sort of team work.

[Guest]

Thank you SP61HJ for your advice, your set up sounds like what we would like to achieve although we have 2 teachers, 1 full time TA and a helper in the morning. We do have a SEN TA but that is because of a behaviour need and he can't be left on his own. i think we are just going to have to try different things and see what works best.

[MrsL]

We also have 45 children, there are 2 teachers, a nursery nurse and 2 TA's. Me and the other teacher take turns to work with the 2 groups of children(23 in one group, 22 in the other) for whole class teaching, Eg, monday she teaches group1 and I do group 2, then Tuesday we swop. This allows us to both have a good overview of where all the children are at. We work with different small groups throughout the day along with our nursery nurse, but over the week we make sure we have all worked equally with all children if possible. We plan together and teach the same lesson to our 2 main groups.

While we are teaching or working with our small groups our TA's are hearing readers or supporting play/observing etc.

During the afternoon we all decide what we want to do between ourselves Eg, I might say i want to do the KUW focus, someone else might say they will finish something from the morning, someone might say they will finish the reading etc as long as all the jobs/activities get done, it doesn't matter who does them!

 

Hope this makes sense!