Day one of guided reading.....

Today, after a little more coaching from Molly I did my first bit of guided reading.
It's with the Year 3 class that I may (or may not - there's more uncertainty been thrown into the mix now) be associated with through my acting as the afternoon TA to my year 3 boy.

But he's not here until June (maybe) so in the meantime I get to work with just 5 pupils.
Guided reading is a very strange thing - I thought I was doing it right, following the instructions one of the TAs gave me - sit them down, talk about the book so far and then get them to read a couple of pages, discuss, read another couple of pages, discuss, repeat, repeat.
But now I've spent the last half hour googling the subject and I'm not so sure I did it right at all.
Will have to think it through and talk to some more people about it.
Or maybe I'm doing what I'm always guilty of - overthinking it?

The great bit about the guided reading was the enthusiasm of the class when I came in.
Of all the classes in the school Year 3 & Year 4 are the ones I've had the most contact with. The teachers are the most IT literate and have been the ones to make best use of me in the ICT suite. I've already taken a couple of lessons with each class - e-mail and spreadsheets mostly - and the children know me quite well. They're a lovely set of children and always eager to learn.
When I went into class 3, the teacher had already told them that I'd be replacing their usual TA because she'd moved into Foundation and they were all really excited. Now I know that it wasn't all because of me; children at their age get excited about anything new and different really easily, but it was still really nice to be in demand and the disappointment of the ones who didn't get me was a nice thing for my ego to hear!

So all in all, not a bad start. Of course, the whole thing will take on a much harder aspect when my Year 3 boy comes back; his lack of an attention span beyond a couple of minutes will make the whole group a harder prospect to do anything with but it's gone well so far and I'm pleased.

I also managed to get some training sorted out today as well. I'm off on a TA induction course in May and June - 4 sessions of day release. And I'm booked onto the introductory session at Woldgate College for the NVQ TA level 2 course they run from September.
So I'm really, honestly, taking that big step of training for a new, hopefully wonderfully rewarding career.
Scary.