Guided Reading nightmare.....

Guided reading with my little group of Year 3 children today was an absolute bloody nightmare.

The theory is that I take a group of 6 children out to the library where we sit and read a book. Because they're not great readers we have to have them reading aloud one at a time and normally it's okay.
This week all was not okay.

They must have had some fucking hideous e-numbers for lunch to account for their behaviour - crap concentration, awful reading, arguing with each other, fidgeting, talking over the reader. You name it, they did it. Half an hour of guided reading felt more like three, and by the end of it I was convinced I was abolutely crap at this part of the job, which made me wonder if signing up for the Teaching Assistant's course in September was really the best thing to do.

Luckily, I had chance to chat with the teacher and she told me that they get like this sometimes and many times with their old TA the whole group would behave so badly that they'd have to be marched into the Head's office for a bollocking.

Then I spoke to the old TA, who's absolutely great in a classroom, better than a lot of the teachers, and she said they used to do it all the time to her, some days she would spend all her time telling them off and they were lucky if they read a page each!
That did make me feel better, if even the experienced TA had trouble, then I was still doing okay. It's really all about having confidence in my abilities to do the TA thing. Most times I'm re-assured that the job is something I'm ideally suited for, but occasionally something like this will happen and i start thinking maybe I'd be better stacking shelves at Sainsburys.
(But then again, Orange is so not my colour).