First Week of Classes at UOW

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It is midweek here in Wollongong, and classes are just beginning. I knew what I was getting into when I signed up to go to a University almost twice the size of La Verne, but these classes are huge! My biggest class last semester was 35 people (maybe een 30 people), but the classes here are about 200 people. Thank god we get split up into smaller tutorial classes after the big lecture or I would not know what to do.

My first class was Movement and Sport Acquisition on Monday, and that was about 60 people, maybe. For our tutorial we went to the Sports Hub which has three indoor basketball courts and we split into groups of about 15 people and played different types of games: warm ups, communication games, and elimination games. Throughout the tutorial we were being asked questions about how we would teach these kinds of games to young children and why or why not they would be effective. I really like the way the teachers make us think about how we would teach these games to young children. Even though I do not want to be a PE teacher it makes me think of ways I could use these games with the children I will be working with one day.

My second class was today, Wednesday, and it is called Literacy and Language for Early Childhood. It is a huge class! This is my class with about 200 people in it. We sit in a massive lecture hall and the teacher is hooked to a microphone so everyone can hear her and there are two projectors so everyone can see what is on the screen. I walked into the lecture hall and was immedietly blown away by its size. I did not know what to expect but the size of this "class room" is so different from what I am used to at home it was really overwhelming. After lecture we break into tutorials that are more the size of classes we have at La Verne which made me feel a lot more comfortable. Everyone, professors included, seems really approchable and nice. I talked to the teacher of my tutorial after class about what to expect, and I may have to spend some time in an Australian preschool or child care center. I should hear about that some time next week.

My next and final class of the week is tomorrow! It is my Creative Arts for Young Children class so it should be fun. It is also getting moved to Tuesdays so I will only have class Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday! SCORE! Hopefully I wont be as overwhelmed by the size of the class tomorrow and will get used to the big lecture halls as time goes on.

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