Evaluate How Own Knowledge Understanding and Skills in Literacy

UNIT 303 How my knowledge, understanding and skills in Literacy, Numeracy and ICT impacts on my practice.

In this assignment, I am going to describe how my knowledge and understanding and skills in Literacy, Numeracy and ICT help and impacts on my teaching assistant role at my school. All teachers and their assistants are required to have the literacy, numeracy and ICT knowledge, understanding and personal skills. This will equip us to develop inclusive approaches to addressing the literacy, numeracy and ICT needs of our pupils.

I believe I know how to find information from books and know how to use the Internet efficiently to provide me with a good background idea. I often take notes to help me be ahead of the lesson or to remember what is the lesson about and I refer to the planning, which I am provided with by the teacher on daily basis. I believe I am confident in feeding back information to the teacher I am working with about our activities or group work. Literacy, Numeracy and ICT support: I play a key role in supporting the children with their activities after the teacher’s input.

I usually support smaller, lower ability groups. I find out from the teacher about our activities beforehand, how is the lesson organized and or what is my specific role in the learning activity. I would prepare the resources needed for the particular lesson ahead, often while the teacher is providing the input for the children and do necessary photocopying or sticking pupil’s work into their books. While working with the groups I make sure I am being encouraging during the activities and that all the children implement the right, agreed strategy throughout the lesson.

I provide the feedback and monitor the progress of the pupils and report any problems to the teacher. I often get to mark my group’s work if there is enough time afterwards or possibly in the afternoon while children do more independent work. Within the Literacy timetable I am often reading with children and provide constant feedback to the teacher about their progress as well as assessing them in their reading ability and benchmarking them to the next level if required after the discussion with the teacher.

I also support lower ability group in their phonics lesson, I prepare daily activities for this sessions and provide progress report to the teacher on weekly basis. I play games with the children, use visual strategies and revise with them all the time to extend their phonics basics. I also do weekly spelling tests in groups and keep records of their progress in spelling area of Literacy. I regards to Numeracy sessions, again they often run similarly to Literacy lessons, where I get to prepare appropriate maths resources and organize the group work or work with certain individuals.

I often need to repeat teacher’s instructions to re-enforce what pupils should be able to achieve and maybe introduce follow-on tasks to extend learning of the more able pupils. I feel, I still have a lot to learn in Numeracy department, partly due to the fact that I was not educated in the UK and the strategies for some mathematical activities are solved very differently here that I would had been used to. Luckily in Year 1 I can catch up fairly quickly and I am learning along side our children. I can pick right resources for their activities – like number lines, numbers squares, counter and on.

I am fairly confident computer user and I use it in every day activities or planning time. Our children use ICT suite facilities on weekly basis and I have found that my ability in ICT has improved over time. I usually help children with logging in if some struggle, I help with opening particular programs and save and retrieve work when and where necessary. Also I can use email, which I often use in communicating with teacher or currently my tutors. I understand about health and safety related to using computers not just thinking about unsafe cables but also computer ergonomics and e safety.

I am not necessarily always aware of how the programmes the children use work, but on this level it is all quite self-explanatory or if I’m unsure I ask our ICT lady and she is always happy to brief me before the session. I believe I am able to solve problems related to I. C. T to a certain extent. I am confident with printing documents although am cautious when determining the number being printed. Also I am confident with straight forward photocopying and getting more practice with more complex photocopying features like enlarging or manipulating the image.

Every so often I come across the situation in the classroom where I need to ask or be advised about how to resolve the issue or find out the answer from the teacher or other staff. That is a proof of my need to improve and learn every day because I as long as there are questions that need answering, my learning does not stop yet. I would like to extend and put in better use the correct mathematical vocabulary and try to use various prompts to encourage mathematical skills in our pupils. I would also like to become more familiar with wide variety of techniques in problem solving exercises.

I have learnt basics of the Phonics sessions, but would like to extend this knowledge further and hoping to receive the training from my school in near future about the Phonics system in more detail. I would help me tremendously as I sometimes run out of ideas to teach my group the same sounds over and over again without them getting bored and uninterested at times. There are few areas in ICT I would also need to brush up on – for example PowerPoint programme, as I do not use it very often, but do find it useful when I do get to use it.

Also spreadsheets on Excel programme are not my strong point. But as with anything, if you do not use it very often, it becomes less familiar. Smart boards are a little bit of a mystery to me, too as I do not get involved in preparing daily input on it or uploading the files, but I can use it when it is on and running. So plenty to improve on and develop in future and that is why I am also attending this course – to provide me with better and deeper understanding of my role in school and improve my knowledge and skills in various types of the curriculum.