Moving On Up

Today was Move Up Day at school - where the children all move on to their new class and new teacher for a session to get a taster of what is in store for them after the summer holidays. As a little introduction I got each child to tell me their name (all of which I promptly forgot - depression has turned my short term memory to mush, I used to be excellent at picking up names with new classes!) and then roll a dice. Depending on the number the dice landed on, I would ask them a question to get to know a little bit more about them. This saved the blank moments of little children racking their brains for 'something interesting about yourself' and ensured that one person didn't hog lots of time chatting and eat into the activity I had planned. The questions were:

1. How many brothers and sisters do you have?

2. What is your favourite food?

3. Do you have any pets?

4. When is your birthday?

5. What is your favourite toy or book?

6. What do you want to be when you grow up?

Quite a few of the girls threw a number six and answered with a wee smile in my direction "A teacher..." - I'm fairly certain it was more for brownie points than the truth, but it made me smile. I threw a six too and was rather stumped with how to answer!

After the little introduction, I worked on a team building activity because the children in my class are being merged together from three separate classes. I decided that a good way to build a team would be to chat a little bit about my move from England to Scotland and tell the class how much the idea of the different clans, with their clan names and tartans and their fierce loyalty and teamwork, had fascinated me. I split the children into three groups and assigned each a task towards creating our clan. Here are their (adorable!) efforts:

The writing is a little hard to see due to the past-its-best felt tip the wee boys used but our new name is Clan Spotlight Stars and our clan motto is "Never be sad." The picture inside the clan crest shows two pupils working on a project together, and is representing teamwork. The tartan is woven from strips of sugar paper.

I'm so glad I did this activity with them; their responses to the class discussion and the set tasks were lovely and I really like the little motto they came up with. There are a set of twins in the class and one of them explained that to follow our class motto, she would always try to cheer her twin sister up if she ever looked sad!

If anyone would like to copy the activity with a class, this is the Clan version which I used, but I have also created a Coat of Arms version for those who don't have ties to Scotland.