Smoothing Out The Transition To Secondary

Y6 students who are starting at MHS next year had a transition day today - a little taster into what life will be like at a secondary school next year. As part of the day, the Y6 students had a double lesson of PE and my OUED class were asked to run this. This was a great opportunity for us to spend the last couple of weeks leading up to transition day linking back to our Group Dynamics unit and compare how my students were interacting with each other now to the beginning of the semester. We had some great discussion around Tuckman's stages of group development and where there had been shifts across the stages.

Unfortunately some of my students didn't show up for transition day, but we made the day work and the kids that were there did a great job. It was a great final lesson for the year. Running activities for a large group of students with a lot of energy is challenging for teachers let alone 13/14 year olds! They knew that this was a great opportunity for leadership experience though, which is a key skill to develop in OUED. A few of them really took the role seriously and I could see they were reflecting with their partners after each of their rotations to try and make their activity 'better'.

The structure of the day, the number of students and several teachers was an organisational experience for me too. I don't often plan events like this and in fact I don't know whether I had organised anything with this many moving parts on my own before! I certainly enjoyed planning and going on camps more, but it was still experience nevertheless. Although I was running around like a headless chicken for nearly two hours (great for my steps!) and there were some things that could have been changed, overall the session ran pretty smoothly. The Y6s had a taste into a variety of team building activities (such as obstacle courses, creating shelters and relays) as well as a mixture of invasion and target games including floor hockey, number games and beanbag throws - so I feel we met the brief!

I do enjoy organising things so event management could be something I dabble in more. In the future maybe I could keep an eye out for opportunities to develop these skills further. Next week is Activities Week so today was also my last teaching day at Marryatville! Here's to the next chapter, whatever that may bring...