Chatter 26 July 2012: Unleash One... Mulitage Classrooms

Unleash One...

How does everyone cope with 3 or more kids in the classroom? 
Do you have any good tips to share. 
What about underschool age or preshool, how do you manage them?



With patience. Organisation. Try and create a time where everyone can do craft at one time. It is hard for other kids to watch the fun stuff when doing boring maths etc. And its one mess.

Plan!!! I bought a high school teachers diary/planner. Keep everything organised. Weeks ahead if you need to

Life is crazy but organisation is the key. The other thing is with more kids they are often a little more use to working without someone standing on top of them

Try and look ahead with activities - especially maths and science and see if you can combine the two or 3 year levels. Like I have 3 in the school room, one was looking at quarters and halves, the other was looking at halving things and another was looking at sharing things equally. So i combined all the activities and we did everything as a group.

It doesn't hurt younger kids to be exposed to things beyond there level and it certainly doesn't hurt older kids to go back and revise concepts from the past. You can also ask the older kids to get more involved with teaching the concept to the younger ones. This helps with so many more things than you can imagine - such as descriptive sentences, language skills, revision and more!

Planning, planning, planning. My kids are used to working on their own and just asking for help if they need it. In the past I have given the older kids their own timetable to follow, but Hay SOTA is really good about making things easier for large schoolrooms. They all do the same topic in maths, most of the time their literacy has the same focus and art, hsie and science are done as "family units" - which in the past I used to combine do all together anyway. Always have something independent they can do while waiting for help; journal, reading, crosswords, puzzles..

A good dose of patience, humour & be organised!!