At the start of term 3, I joined the chicken crew because I wanted to teach the younger students and be a part of their learning. In the first few weeks, we brainstormed ideas on how we could use the chickens to teach and inform the students. The first step was to define our goal. Then we had to start thinking. We thought about why the chickens were at All saints’ College. We thought of all the sustainable benefits, and the money-saving benefits. The money-saving benefits would stop the school from having to buy eggs for the food class and it would also help sustainably because this would stop the school from having to drive to school and buy the eggs themselves. The chickens also eat food scraps, and their poo turns into compost which helps the school gardens. We then thought of the ways it has benefited the college already. We focused on the senior school and teachers to start. We realised that not many people knew about the chickens. We thought of ways to advertise the chickens, but unfortunately, we never went through with that. We then started discussing the little children. We looked through the Australian curriculum and decided that the Pre-primary and Kindy kids would be the easiest curriculum to follow and would be the most beneficial to the kids. We started by brainstorming ideas that we could teach the kids. Jake, Aidan, and I all organised meetings with the 4 teachers. Fortunately, they loved our idea and were extremely happy to let us teach the kids. We talked with them and found out that worksheets were outdated and they did things on the board together instead of using their ipads. We adapted our ideas to their capabilities to make a standout lesson that included things like chicken tours, clay models, drawing, and much more.
A capability that I used myself a lot this semester was courage. It took a lot of courage to stand up in front of a whole class and run activities and tell them to do stuff. I also needed to be organised and get down to class straight after lunch on time so we could get down to the kid’s classes to maximise our time with them. I also had to be really resilient because I felt really disheartened especially when the kids weren’t into our lessons and got distracted easily. I used resilience to keep going and to keep trying to be interesting to get them involved and interested in our lesson. Another really important capability was problem-solving. After every lesson, we would come back to our class and reflect and talk about what went well and what we could improve on. We identified our weaknesses and used problem-solving to solve them and improve. Some challenges we faces were the students losing interest, teachers not replying to emails, and being late to our class which gave us less time with the kids.
Overall, the chicken task was an enjoyable, rewarding task that I would definitely do again if I had the opportunity. It was really fun and was very unique and different to other aspects of school. I really loved working with the little kids.
