I don’t think there is actually a word to describe how tired
I am right now!! It’s Saturday morning and I'm sat at my desk feeling rather
shell-shocked, but with an enormous grin on my face. I feel like I should be
viewing this year as a fresh start, but it’s hard not to draw comparisons with
last year, when I cried every single day of the month that I spent teaching.
Sometimes, more than once a day. I haven’t cried even once this past week. In
fact, I've smiled - a LOT! There are no doubt multiple other ways in which this
week has been better than last year – and a good week in its own right – but for
now, the fact that I haven’t cried at all feels like a massive achievement. I actually
LOVE teaching, and I think I’d forgotten that when I was ill. It’s been so
lovely to just enjoy being in a classroom again, and see how enthusiastic and
excited the children are to learn, and feel their joie de vivre rub off on you.
I imagine that once I'm swamped with planning and reports and a research
project, the tears will come, but for now I'm basking in the fuzzy glow of my
successful first week J
At my school, the first three weeks of the year are ‘off
timetable’. This means we can use this time to encourage teamwork within our
class, create class rules, and assess the children so that we can hit the
ground running in week four, with all of our groups in place and a class who
can work well together and know exactly what is expected of them. During these
three weeks, my topic is The Mr. Men. Some activities are stand alone lessons,
but wherever possible I have linked our learning to the Mr. Men and Little Miss
characters and stories. My thinking behind this is that the characteristics
embodied by the Mr. Men and Little Miss characters will help the children to
understand the way we should work in groups, the way we should behave in the
classroom (and the playground), and the fact that each of us is different and
unique from our classmates, teachers and friends.
A Quick Run Down of Week One...
Over the first few days, we read Laura’s Star and The New
Teacher as a whole class novel.
We completed a few activities relating to the book. ‘The Year Ahead’ worksheet gave me useful information on areas which the children
need more work in (the majority cited aspects of numeracy and literacy as things
they struggle with, so most of their personal targets for term one are already
sorted!) and things which they would like to learn about, which means that I
have a HUGE list of potential topics for this year. The second worksheet ‘Invent a Pet’ was just a fun game to get them working with a partner.
We then created some class rules. One of my P4s came up with
the idea of creating a ‘sort of acrostic poem’ so that our rules are easy to
remember, and most of them agreed that the purpose of rules is to keep us safe,
so SAFE quite naturally became our acrostic word.
I really like that the rules they came up with are very
broad; it means that I can manipulate ‘Be Sensible’ to almost any situation to
ensure we are all following the class rules! They then signed a behaviour contract promising to follow the rules for the whole year.
We also completed a number of writing activities about the
Mr. Men. Some children can find it quite tricky to launch straight into a piece
of writing, so I created differentiated worksheets for those who needed a
little extra help. A few children came back to me and asked to try the independent
writing sheet though, which was brilliant to see. I always worry that when you
give children a choice and ask them to choose their own level, they will be
lazy and choose the easiest option for themselves, but I obviously have a class
of little hard workers this year as most of them were keen to have a go at the
independent writing!
Somehow we managed to squeeze in a few circle time
discussions about the Mr. Men’s different characteristics, and whether we
should have these particular characters in our classroom or not; some ICT time
searching for different Mr. Men websites and playing some games on them; show
and tell about our summer holidays; creating a giant Mr. Men picture; PE and
music lessons with our specialists and some reading assessments to see which
reading groups we will be in this year!
Because it was such a busy week, I forgot to take photos of most
of the activities we did. One thing I did remember to take a quick picture of
on Friday was the Mr Cubes we made on Thursday afternoon:
 |
| Check out my Welcome bunting! |
I downloaded a net template for a cube from SEN teacher.
Some of my older ones had made 3D shapes from nets before and we able to work
as group leaders helping the little ones to cut out and stick their Mr Men together. I love seeing them peer teach one another J
Finally we used to named pegs I showed off in the last post
to display our favourite piece of work from this week.
Phew! I'm exhausted so I can’t imagine how my children are
feeling. Overall I’d say that the week has been a success. The children have
engaged with the lessons, and I have got some good examples of writing from
each of them to go into their learning files. With the focus of these first few
weeks being teamwork and bonding as a class, I think that I need to include
more group activities next week. Currently I'm a bit too sleepy to do much
about it! Lazy Saturday I think, and I’ll spend Sunday planning...
PS – The pencil caddies I made in the last post fell apart
on me a bit! Obviously the superglue I used isn't as super as it claims to be.
Or else, I have a lot of very strong and secretly destructive seven year olds
in my class.
PPS – I will usually try to post a bit more regularly, rather
than lumping a whole week together at a time, but I currently don’t have access
to the internet all the time, so am having to try and squeeze everything I need
to do online into a few hours each weekend!
