I survived! First literacy lesson is now done :)

The kids may have done their best to knock me down but I have come out of my first full literacy lesson still standing.
I will admit it wasn't the best lesson and definitely didn't go as well as I had hoped but there were a lot of positives and so many mistakes to learn from.
You always get told you learn more from your mistakes and I think I will find that out more than ever this year.
The start of the lesson was a nightmare as it came just after an argument with four of the hardest girls in the class which took the teacher half an hour to sort out.
Partly because of this but mostly because of my unclear instructions it took so long to get to the carpet and most of the time I was teaching the children were talking (apparently more than I noticed).
So off they went to do their work and up the noise level went. At this point to say the lesson wasn't running smoothly was an understatement.
However I managed to do what I thought would be one of the hardest skills and grab the lesson from the brink of failure.
I took them back to the carpet for the second half of the lesson, explained in no uncertain terms that their behaviour was simply not good enough and I expected.
This grabbed their attention so I could explain what they were doing for the remainder of the lesson and that went much smoother.
Then the plenery was great, my mento praised my choice of question and how they answered it, with all of them listening carefully.
But talk about a lesson of ups and downs to start off my teaching career. If the rest of the year is going to be anything like that lesson then I have quite a ride ahead of me