WELCOME SESSION

UNIT X - INTRODUCTION AND WORKSHOP

The first session/day of Unit X was an introduction about what the unit will hold, what we should expect, rules and regulations and some small group workshops.

The group was shown a video clip of the outcome of Unit X last year. It was very insightful in terms of knowing how broad this unit is and how the workshops will come together. I thought this was a good video to show because it made me become more attached to this unit and know that the outcome can be as creative as we want it to be. 

For the first part of the meeting we discussed all the rules and regulations that will be applied to this unit, what we should and should not do while we are at the placement and what makes a good or bad lesson.

(Images above) Notes from the first Unit X meeting.

Workshop
In this session we did a workshop in groups of 4. We were given a scenario, which was that there is a Children's Book Festival in Manchester and it was going to take place at MMU in Geoffrey Manton. We were told to make buntings for the day and to plan a workshop that we could do on the day revolved around this idea. 

(Images above) Mind map of the ideas generated from our group discussion on the Bunting Workshop.

Our idea for the workshop was that we were going to make the bunting workshop a drop in session so who ever wants to come in and add to the bunting can do so. Also, to make the bunting we thought the people that come to our workshop could photocopy a page from their favourite book or a book they have with them or we will have a box of books that they could choose from also.

After we had decided on an idea we had to share it and while we were sharing is Clare (tutor) was going to create a different scenario that we would have to work around and apply to our workshop. The scenario that was given to us that we were going to have young children who are deaf and blind join our workshop. 

(Image above) We had to apply some of the styles of learning into our workshop. Also, there is the sheet of our planning for the workshop (right).

We tried our best to incorporate this into our workshop. So as a group we thought for the the blind children we would have different textured paper out on a table where they could touch and feel and choose which material they would like and we would assist them in making it apart of the bunting. As for the deaf children we thought there could be someone doing sign language to them about what to do and then we could again assist them with choosing material for the bunting. So at this point we thought we had a well planned idea.

However, this probably wasn't the case. When we came to present this I feel as though firstly we didn't put our idea out properly maybe and when we were getting asked questions by Clare as to how it would work I think we realised planning a workshop for special needs children is way more difficult than we thought. 

Overall, this workshop was mainly to make us realise that teachers could get any situation put at them and they had to be ready for it. Even though this scenario was difficult for us to plan for it gave me an insight to how it could be in the future and so there should always be a 'plan b' to our plans.