TAs - what work are you doing from home?

[Popsicales]

I’m a TA and currently I’m only in school every other week for two days.

There seems to be more of a focus on what we’re doing at home. We are expected to be following training or researching but mostly we have to find it ourselves.

I’m just wondering what other TAs are doing at home? Can you recommend anything to be getting on with? We have to be filling in a log of the time we are spending on home learning so I’m keen to find things to fill some time but I’d like them to be useful rather than just something to write down on the log for the sake of it.

There are lots of courses on teaching/education on FutureLearn. Also Microsoft gave some free courses that are good.

Do you have access to LinkedIn learning?

The open university have some great free courses that would be relevant for EYFS and SEN mainly

You can search by topic and there is an Education section

Have a look here:- www.open.edu/openlearn/free-courses/full-catalogue?fbclid=IwAR1Z2NoxgjXw3rSKGfgm6FIAlI8q2ZysOQHpF_jiuv3hct5401b_QecEA5k
These are all the free courses on the Open University website. In the Education and Development section, there are lots of courses that are relevant to TAs, such as Understanding Autism and Understanding Dyslexia. It tells you how long the course should take as well, so you can plan how much to do each day.

Thank you for the recommendations! I completed some of the open university ones a couple of months back in preparation for (hopefully) starting my PGCE in September. They were useful so I’ll look in to completing more.

@Cornishmumofone No, I don’t think I have access to LinkedIn learning. Do you have to pay for it?

Our local college offer loads of free online courses - several related to working with children. Let me know if you want me to send you a link as you can enrol from anywhere in the country. Would it be useful to learn Makaton? I'm doing that by watching videos on Youtube. Could you create some resources at home that might be useful for next year?

We haven't been asked to keep a log, just have various suggestions sent to us, plus a a couple of short online H&S.

FutureLearn Understanding Autism is a good one.

Makaton is a good idea too.

Online courses.
Shifts at school.
Looking at and commenting on children's work online.

My school had recommended Reddy Made Maths You Tube training for TAs and teachers to refresh/update their skills - it’s worth a look. A new session is posted daily - Day 8 today is great but worth looking at the previous ones. Covers KS1 and KS2 and is practical and realistic for using in the classroom

Safeguarding (the Prevent training we do annually). Plus safeguarding relevant to closed schools and how our role is still relevant.
Health And Safety - working at home.
Themed CPD i.e Speech and Language, Dyslexia, ACEs, Bullying.
If there is anything we have been interested in then we can look at that too and feed back to SLT in case it’s useful to other staff.
Some require signing up and logging in but others are just for reading and sending brief feedback about what we have learned and how we could see ourselves applying it when schools reopen.

TAs in our school are all accessing Class Dojo and are supporting children on it, daily. We have a weekly staff meeting online and are commenting on and helping to mark, work that is submitted. We’re in close contact with the children who we work with 1:1 or in small groups. Some staff are on a rota to work in school when we have key workers children in. It all seems to be working well and everyone seems to be just getting on with it. I can’t wait to go back though....when the time is right.

Is there anything you could be doing to support the children? As a teacher I’m completely snowed under planning, filming, resourcing home learning activities and then responding to work uploaded and parent questions on Seesaw. Absolutely my job, but hard work with a 17 month old!

I’m going to bring it up at our next Zoom teacher meeting that maybe some of our lovely TAs could be set up as an extra teacher on Seesaw to do at least part of the responding to children. I know they’d be happy to do it, they’re great like that.

Apart from reading a few emails and a 10 second contribution to a staff video, I’ve done nothing.

I would definitely help with something like that thunder. We haven't been asked to do anything apart from our day on the rota. Some of us are doing online courses but I haven't. I have 2 DS at home while DP is still at work so would find completing a course difficult but would be happy to work with the children any way I could. I really miss them.

I am doing an on line course but also keeping in contact with about 30 students a week by email and every other week I am ringing about half of them.

I am also going into school one day every two weeks .

Supporting students in school and keeping a 2 metre distance is pretty much impossible. I am in secondary so I have no idea how primary are managing.

The TA’s at my school are on 7.5 days in 7.5 days WFH. We are doing all the contact with the children whilst the SLT and on rota teacher hide away in the staff room and office. So when I’m WFH I’m inclined to do bugger all.