Week Three

Today was our assessment day. Our project manager from The Big Lottery "Life in London" scheme was waiting for us in the school foyer, ready to report on how we're doing with the course so far. It certainly didn't feel like an assessment - she didn't sit there with a clipboard taking notes with pursed lips. On the contrary, she joined in and helped to keep control of some of the more "excitable" pupils so, in fact, her presence was quite reassuring!

Today, as is becoming the custom, we ran through some of the muscle and bone names and where they're found in the body. We bring "Stan the skeleton" with us each week to help us with this - it's very useful to have him as a prop.

We'd asked the group to come up with some facts about organs and one pupil had really spent a great deal of time on his research. His hand shot up with every question we asked and our project manager later referred to him as "the one with the encyclopedic knowledge". The others had done their homework too so our section on organs went well. We'd decided to cover organ location this session and leave function until next week. We've already clocked on to the fact that, whatever we've planned, we'll only cover about half of it, so we thought it best to teach organs over two sessions. The whole group found it fascinating to find out about all the organs in their body and we managed to keep them interested for quite some time. We went slightly off track (this happens a lot!) when someone asked why veins appear blue but blood is red.....but got back on track eventually.

We made them all work physically harder today. We had them in rows, taking it in turns to run different drills up and down the sports hall having already done their standing and floor exercises. All of the group did the drills as directed, apart from one little chap who has so much energy that he's unable to slow down and control a series of knee lifts or side steps and just hurtles from one end of the hall to the other.

We were able to fully explain the homework today without interruption. We'd brought juice with us this week, so a combination of guzzling and exhaustion meant that everyone was blissfully quiet.

Our project manager seemed pleased with how we're doing. She was very positive about our interactive way of teaching and the group did us proud knowing lots of answers and responding well.