Aistear! The Beginning...

...of a never ending journey.

Aistear has taken me on a journey in my teaching career that I never expected. I have always been creative and applied that creativity to my teaching whenever possible... in-between my everyday tightly timetabled lessons. I have been an infant school teacher for years but our school only introduced Aistear properly about 4 years ago and it has been slowly taking off ever since. I was slow to get into it myself, because like most teachers I wondered where I was going to fit this kind of play into my busy and often subject crammed infant day. My first thought was where am I going to find the time, money, and space to implement this new early childhood framework. Before I had even started I was coming up with many reasons just to stick with the way I was doing things.

But my school wanted it to form part of our day so I added a half hour slot into my already crammed timetable. I followed a list of suggested topics like, The Restaurant, The Doctor's Surgery etc. and gave each topic about a month. I generally had 4 or 5 stations that included Junk Art, Construction, Role-play, Sand/Water and Play-doh. And so for the year I struggled through the topics not really fully knowing what I was trying to get out of this play time. And, I will admit I struggled with the idea that this 'play' felt a little bit like lazy teaching. So here is a list of possible reasons why I thought aistear wouldn't work...
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• Time... how to fit Aistear into a busy day
• no money to resource all these different topics
• no space in the classroom
• how could I make the children stay on topic and learn topic specific content objectives
• It takes so long to plan and organise on top of my weekly lesson plans
• Only one ME to support the children's learning

 
Of course I couldn't have been more wrong!... click on the above points to read about how I managed these problems. My blogs are full of ways in which I adapted my teaching to incorporate Aistear as my main teaching methodology. 
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Thank you for visiting my blog, I hope that you will join me on my journey this year and please share your thoughts and ideas in the comments section... 

​Zara