First timer in Junior Infants

After years of contemplating, I finally moved to teach Junior Infants this year. The majority of my teaching experience lies in 2nd-4th Class, so moving to Junior Infants this year was a great shock to the system.

It was challenging and fast-paced, but I loved every minute of it. In this post, I’ll go through some things that helped me to adjust to the change and how I continued to upskill throughout the year.

Proving that as teachers, we never stop learning.

Moving to Junior Infants has forced me to upskill my practice and also my teaching strategies. To adapt them to meet the needs of our youngest learners. Following Infant specific Instagram accounts has been a huge help to me. As well as adopting the mantra of “slow down to catch up”.

I looked at this transition to Junior Infants as a time for me to slow down and learn with the children as we go, what works for them and what doesn’t.

Instagram accounts that have helped me hugely: Playful Classroom, Infant Education, All things Primary & Clara Fiorentini, Read Write Jen & Aistear in Action

These accounts provide simple, yet effective strategies and tips for the teaching of infants. The strategies and tips that they share are researched based and realistic to implement in the classroom. Quality over quantity every day of the week.

Preparing for Junior Infants

Last Summer, my aim was to upskill through courses targeted specifically to Junior Infants. I engaged in these online courses and while I found the sheer volume of information overwhelming, I felt more prepared for teaching Junior Infants in September and had an idea of what to expect.

Teaching and Learning in the Early Childhood Setting. I learned SO much from this course in terms of:

• Playful learning
• Early Literacy
• Early Maths
• Organising the Infant Classroom
• Pre-Handwriting
• & much, much more.

I was tempted to do this course again this year it was that good! Highly recommend to anyone teaching in Junior Infants.

2. Practical Irish for Primary School Teachers- Junior and Senior Infants 2022 If like me, you are unsure how best to teach Irish to Infants or are just looking for some fresh ideas, this course with GaelChultur was fantastic. It is filled with simplistic, practical ideas and gave me an insight of how Irish would look in the Infant classroom in September. Included in this course is:

Throughout the year, I attended Phonics webinars to ensure that I was teaching Phonics correctly in the classroom. As this was my first year ever teaching Phonics, it was an area I wanted to focus on and “do right”. Dee from Playful Classroom hosted a series of Phonics webinars throughout the year, which were very informative.

Jennifer O’ Sullivan also hosted some webinars on the Science of Reading, which were also great.

Keep an eye out for them during the year if you’d like some pointers on how to best approach Phonics with Junior Infants. There are also fantastic Phonics instruction videos on the Literacy Channel too if interested:

Do you have to do all of these courses and webinars? Absolutely not, but I found them incredibly helpful as a first timer in Junior Infants.

Collaboration is Key

If you’re fortunate enough to work in a year group with more than one Junior Infant class, you’re blessed. While I came into Junior Infants armed with summer course information and previous teaching experiences, I found the advice from my partner teacher to be invaluable.

We planned together, shared resources, spoke about classroom layout, how best to use the learning support/resource in our classes etc. If you’re teaching with someone that’s been in Junior Infants before, use them. Ask them questions, notice what they’re doing and see if it can be adapted to work in yours.

Yes you’ll have loads of your own ideas that will work great, but having the opportunity to collaborate with another Junior Infant teacher can really be so helpful in what can be a flurry of a year, changing year groups.

Transitions with Junior Infants

Junior Infants need frequent movement. As do children of all ages, but in particular, our youngest learners. This was a huge learning curve for me this year and I built frequent movement into our day to keep the children engaged, interested and happy.

I did this through our transitions from lesson to lesson. Below I created a post in how I use Music to involve movement into our day, while covering Music at the same time. We used (and LOVED) the Dabbledoo Music program. It full of simple songs, with a visual of the beats being counted out, which was a nice calming transition for children.

There was also an element of classroom community too, as children were all coming together as a class to sing/dance to songs we had learned as a class. A nice, calming transition incorporating movement was a winner.

This can be done using simple call and response songs too.

See more on this here.

September with Junior Infants

A whirlwind and an experience that is both a privilege and time of sheer exhaustion all rolled into one, with a rainbow bow on top.

A type of exhaustion I didn’t know existed either, but we got there.

September with Junior Infants was something I had heard about, “planned for”, but didn’t expect. The best advice I was given was:

• To slow everything RIGHT down.
• Give lots of time for child-led play.
• Ditch the play rota (this was the best thing I did).
• Teach routines. Re-teach them & re-teach them.
• Watch them play and identify their interests.
• Read lots of stories.

For more on the first few days of Junior Infants, check out this post: http://www.infanteducation.ie/infanted-blog/first-days-of-school.

Teaching in Junior Infants this year has been my favourite teaching year so far. It was also the most challenging by a long shot, but I have learned so much myself and cannot wait to do it all again in September.

After a well deserved Summer break for all, of course!

Have a lovely Summer!