TS8 report form

This section of my PP2 report form highlights my contribution to the wider life of the school environment whilst on placement. I attended numerous school trips planned in different year groups, including the Year 6 two night residential, communicated effectively with parents, including through parents’ evening and through written dialogue, and engaged positively in staff meetings and CPD INSETs. I always tried to incorporate the advice and targets given to me from observations into my practice in order to positively impact on the children’s experiences and progress. I positively collaborated with my teaching assistant to enable identified groups of children to make further progress in their learning and developed positive relationships with all school staff.

Maths parents’ booklet

Parents Booklet

I created this guidance booklet for parents and carers as one of my portfolio tasks. Despite not having used the booklet in a school, I created it based on the maths policy from my Professional Practice 1b school and on my interpretations of how parents viewed their children’s mathematics abilities whilst on that placement. It is something which I would be happy to share with parents as I feel it would help with their children’s progress.

I am already aware of the vitality of taking responsibility for and being accountable for children’s attainment, progress and outcomes. However, I also recognise that this extends to beyond the school environment and can be strongly influenced by parents, carers and other family members. As a result, the creation of this booklet allows family members to improve their own understanding of the methods and concepts covered at the stage that is relevant to their child. I know the importance of communicating with parents and carers in regards to their child’s achievements and this is one way of doing so whilst also directly impacting upon the child’s progress. Hopefully, using something similar to this in school would help to form strong collaborative links with families and also have a positive impact on children’s motivation and capabilities.

Throughout the booklet I have included the relevant teaching strategies for the appropriate curriculum areas as well as methods of applying the content the children are learning to real-life scenarios in order to foster and maintain their interest in the subject. This enables parents to feel confident in addressing any misunderstandings their child may have, implement engaging mathematical learning into their child’s everyday experiences and use suitable strategies to help progress their child’s understanding without causing confusion, which I found that a lot of parents felt would happen if they intervened.

The booklet I created covers a number of areas that are included in the National Curriculum for year 2, such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, problem solving and shape. Each of these areas in the booklet included an explanation of the strategies which would be used in school, key vocabulary related to the topic, resources that could be used to support the children’s learning and real-life applications. This demonstrates my understanding of the importance of ensuring parents and carers are confident in the knowledge and understanding their children are developing and also shows my own subject knowledge in regards to teaching early mathematics.