New Year, New Starters

This week I have been over in Manchester helping our new starters settle into their new schools. On Monday I had the pleasure of teaching alongside our brand-new Music and Media instructor Olly. We spent the day teaching keyboards to KS1 and KS2 who really excelled at the subject. Outside of Junior Jam Olly plays the drums professionally and is a fantastic musician, and it was great to see his enthusiasm for music and the music curriculum displayed in his PPA cover lessons. Olly has a really varied timetable and due to his experience in music production, video editing and photography he is also teaching our iMedia PPA lessons throughout the week. On Tuesday Olly and I spent the day teaching Junior Jam’s photography and graphic design PPA cover courses. The KS1 students loved being given the chance to take photos using our Junior Jam iPads and editing them before arranging the images into a collage. The end results were extremely impressive.

The rest of the week I spent team teaching alongside Shane who has made the switch from Music PPA instructor to Media PPA instructor. Shane is a very talented teacher and students find his teaching methods very engaging and inspiring. During the lesson students were tasked with producing a short piece of music using the app Garageband. Like Olly, Shane is also a musician and his knowledge of music and music production is vast. I thoroughly enjoyed my two days spent helping Shane teach our Music Production subject called iJam and it was great to see him settle into his new school so quickly.