Today was a really good day, and I was proud of myself. During second break it rained, and so the outside play that was planning couldn’t go ahead. I spoke to Jenny about it, and then decided to work on the big house we’re making. In the groups I took out we drew up plans, and moved around the boxes. We spoke about what rooms were important, how we wanted the doors and windows to be, and what we would use for various aspects. It worked really well. The kids were really excited about it, and I let them move through the house and explore the rooms so that their excitement about the project was heightened, and so that they were more and more keen on doing more work on it.

 
I felt that the art lesson that I did at the end of the day was a HUGE success. I was so glad and proud that it worked out and that the children created such brilliant prints. I would love to do more art with the children. I am trying to think of ways to incorporate it into other things that we’re learning about. But I do think that art skills are important to learn even all by themselves.

 
I have received a fair few parent help forms now, and have made up a vague timetable of when people are available. I will talk to Kenny about contacting one or two parents about helping with perceptual motor rotations this Friday. See if she thinks that that’s too soon or whatever.

 
I want to do some cooking with the kids soon. I think that would be great. I am not quite sure how to bring it in yet… maybe ANZAC biscuits because we’re learning about what’s around us in Australia?

 
I was also really glad that I was able to help Jenny and Margie this morning with the photos. I had never seen that program before, and so it was good that it did what I expected it too! I would love to get in and clean up all those photos, but there’s just not enough time in the day, or in my case the night either…

 
The kids are really into their play at the moment. Which is good. This morning they didn’t need anyone helping them either. I went out and ‘did the rounds’ and was so pleased to see James and Jayden had created car parks on the concrete for their trucks! It’s great that they’re moving forward with it. I want to take them for a walk around Chancellor Park later in the week so that we can have a look, as a class, at some road signs and things like that. Then hopefully we can be applying more real life aspects to our play!

During play, inside, Ben, Tommy and Elyce were making a museum out of blocks. They even put little dinosaurs inside and things like that! It was really quite spectacular. I took lots of photos!

Today was an experience.

I was a little disheveled this morning when I was told that I was taking the day all on my own. But I got my act together, and made the morning happen.

I really am a planner, I swear. I NEED to be. This was obvious after today. I had  heaps of ideas for the morning session running around in my head, and a few things planned out- but nothing on paper. I hated working like that.

I should have planned, but circumstances the night before left me with little time.

I am still getting my head around the whole ‘ability’ of Preps- it seems to be such a rapidly changing environment. I am always conscious of not ‘pushing’ anything on them, and I find the balance involved in the negotiated curriculum a really hard thing to achieve.

As always rotations went pretty well. I love the structure and predictability of them. I am using a bell for behaviour management purposes with rotations, and that is great!

With the rotations, I wanted to really cement what we had done the previous week, and so I did some similar activities- just with a variation. I was really trying to work on their early mathematical understandings, and some letter recognition.

The activity where they match the capital letter to the little letter, to the picture is to help them with their key board skills. I noticed again in library today, when we were on the computers, that some children are having trouble putting in the right letter, just because it’s a capital. Hopefully just a couple more focus lessons on that will help that a bit.

I want to work on number recognition (hence the dice rotation)and some basic math skills from the number strand. I have heard Chloe H tell everyone that 1+1=2, and the other day we were talking as a group and everyone was just ecstatic about working out what two plus two might be, on our fingers. So I think that they are ready for that, and definitely interested, which I guess is that key.

The bigger/smaller, and odd one out sheets was a bit of a pre-test. I really didn’t know what level they were at when it came to things like that, and so I wanted to see. It was interesting- the results. Everyone knew big/small, and the majority knew which was the odd one out. This might be something that I could look at as well, because it’s a really interesting subject.

 I am still at a loss as with what to do with spare ten minutes. It’s such an awkward time… In the afternoon today I read a story, which was good, but even then there was about 3 minutes after the story. I need to search for some good books that we can have more of a discussion on.

I am trying to make an effort to think of some short little, MEANINGFUL activities that will help fill in those awkward gaps.

 I find it really hard to think quickly on my feet- always have. And so that part of Prep in really challenging. I haven’t found it such a challenge in the other years I’ve been in, and so to combat that I’ve decided to have suggestions in my head, or in a book, to help me think of quick activities.

 Back to the morning sessions. My thoughts are that it was really unstructured, and this was my biggest fault. I didn’t enjoy the lesson so much because of that either. I thought that I had some great ideas- google maps, The Sims, drawing the plans… all good ideas, just not put together really well. I’ve learnt from it though- plans, plans, plans. Particularly on days like today when I’m really able to do that.

 I had to get seriously angry a few times today. But I think that overall my control is improving. I am really trying to mix up my ways of getting their attention. I hate to yell, which is inconvenient, and my voice is not very loud, which is also inconvenient. When I talk loudly for any length of time my voice starts to leave and I go croaky- the pain of never fully getting over the worse cough of my life, which I had for a month and only left the week before school started. Every now and again I still cough.

 It was a bit hard to concentrate today, and harder to keep everyone’s attention because of all the moving, but I kept them when they wouldn’t get in the way, and we dealt with it.

 Another really overwhelming thing I’m finding is how BIG the curriculum is. We are doing SO many things, and it’s really blowing my mind a bit. I was proud of myself for continuing on with the ‘designing a house’ that Jenny had started the other day. I was not 100% sure what we were meant to be doing with that, ’cause it wasn’t my idea, and nothing was really ’said’ about it yet. But I thought that it was important to keep on it, and I remember Jenny saying, after we’d done the activity the other day, that we needed to follow it up and make it meaningful. Students are still struggling with the concept of a ‘plan’, as opposed to a picture of the outside of their house. We’ll need to work on that.

Like I said, SO many things happening. I had really grand intentions of starting the site word chart on Monday, but it’s Wednesday tomorrow and I still haven’t done it.

 To be honest, with a lot of the ideas, and things we’re doing, when i go home and think about it, I always come up with ideas to present it to older kids. I wish that I had seem more ‘teaching’ in my observation times, and less play. But what’s done is done, and things couldn’t be changed back then.

I am learning lots when Jenny does take over and do things with the kids. I think one of the things I need to improve on is making things SOUND more exciting and amazing then they really are. If I do that then the kids get excited about it. Jenny made home readers sound SO exciting today that even I wanted to take one home! But this doesn’t come naturally to me, and is yet another thing for me to work on.

My first  week back at school has been interesting. This week I tried a new behaviour management strategy. A bell. I used it for rotations- so that the kids would know when to change, and so that I didn’t have to raise my voice. I had found, last term, that when we were doing rotations everyone would be really engrossed in what they were doing and sometimes not hear me when I would ask everyone to change. I would do the ‘clap, clap, clap’ thing, but I think that they might get immune to that if I do it all the time. I got the bell idea from Helen Kurtz- a supervising teacher I had last year. She was great.

All holidays I had a really terrible cough and am still not 100% over it. Because of that my voice isn’t very loud (it’s not really very loud at the best of times). So that was another way to combat that situation. I am finding voice projection to be a real issue for me. I have always known this, but is more apparent with the preppies, and also, the fact that Jenny has such an animated, and much louder voice, means that that’s what they’re use to.

On Friday I wrote down some notes about how I could work on that area, and my over all behaviour management, from observing Jenny with the kids. Here’s what I learnt:

Use lots of expression in my voice. This often gets the kids attention, and makes them interested in what I have to say.

Reward good answers and be positive.

I realised this week that I like plans. I like to know what I’m doing and where I’m going. Wednesday was a bad day for me. We were starting our play- new for the term. I thought that the children would give me some ideas of things that they wanted to play and then I would work with that to hopefully make it work with the ‘international’ theme that I was hoping to go with. But the children didn’t really give me what I wanted- they said lots of things that they liked doing, like face painting, and playing outside, and things like that, but no themes. Riley did want to do Australia Zoo again, but I tried to discourage that. Jenny eventually took over and worked it so that we’re playing ‘aboriginals’. I guess the problem with that, that I see, is that they don’t KNOW anything really about aboriginals, and while I know that they’re meant to be learning, it’s hard to hook them in, and to keep them interested if they don’t have any previous knowledge. I was relating it to the Australia Zoo play in term one, and the reason (I think) why that was so successful was because they had already watched Steve Irwin do his thing on TV, they’d already BEEN to Australia Zoo. They had the Bindi DVDs at home, and already knew about Wildlife Warriors etc. It was the finer details, things like how to milk a snake of it’s venom and create anti-venom that were the learning parts of the play- not the play focus itself.

I think that that’s why the museum wasn’t a huge success with the rainforest play either. They didn’t know what it was like in a museum, they didn’t know what to ‘play’. So that’s what I have picked up about play. From my experience that all is.

But what did I learn from Jenny taking over play planning? Apart from Prep being hard, I learnt that the teacher needs to have a pretty pivotal role in planning, even though it’s a negotiated curriculum.

Prep is hard. I am finding the flexibility issue a real challenge- if only everything could be planned and done to plan. This stuff is crazy. I like Tuesdays and Thursdays- rotations days. I like them because I plan what is going to happen, and then that’s what happens. I don’t mind so much if something unexpected comes up, or if something takes more time then I allowed for it. That’s all okay, because I generally have some sort of back up plan as well. My struggle is on play days when it’s so much more up to the kids. When they don’t know what they want, but I have to do something. I find it hard with the three sections that they’re in as well- three groups to manage, encourage and work with. It’s okay when there’s an aide, or when Jenny is able to help as well, but otherwise there is a lot of wasted time.

I am thinking of finding some youtube clips of aboriginals that I can show the kids so that they have a better idea of what they’re playing.

First up we finished off our smart pizza rotations from the day before. I will collate the information later and see if there are any definite signs on one particular smart in any kids.

We played outside with the Sharing Seahorses after break which was really nice. I think it’s really important to play outside and was great for them to play with the other class. I think that that really helps them to understand that they are a whole grade- together.

I was reminded at lunch that we had to make our friendship chain longer- 5 meters in fact. So straight after lunch we made some more links and the children practiced their writing and copying skills and wrote the words on themselves. We made it a little more colourful by putting coloured paper in it as well. Then we did a play plan and worked on play on their rainforests until second break.

After second break we  had group time. We talked about kindness some more and about Gaby Get-a-long. As a class afterwards we sung the Gaby Get-a-long song again.  There were a few requests for Snooklefry, and so I played that. We talked about it as it went though and talked about friendship and related it back to Gaby.

 I have moved to teachingtalia.com!

I thought that this was an interesting read from the Sydney Morning Herald.

This site lets you rate a teacher from 1-5. There’s a bit an uproar about it as some principles and teachers in Sydney and NSW have been badly defamed and are not happy.

I’m pretty sure that this is the site, but I’m not 100% sure. There is a bit of concern on the internet with “The Staffroom” posting an article entitled “How To Get Your Teacher Sacked“. It’s talking about how easy it is for sites like this to cause trouble and a lot of fuss and pain.

It’s not all negative- you CAN rate the teacher well of course. I had a little go (it’s all anonymous) and rated one of my favourite high school teachers. I gave her a 4 out of 5 (there’s always room for improvement!).

My Uni (CQU Noosa) is on there, and everything I know of that I searched for is on there, it’s really quite comprehensive. Just so you all know, it was the top listing on Google when I searched for ‘rate your teacher’.

I’d be interested to know what people think about me going on that site and doing that. My REASON for doing it (even though I’m a ‘teacher’) is that age old saying, you keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. Plus it’s a bit like spreading the karma- if I start writing good things about my teachers and lecturers then hopefully when I’m a teacher I’ll get that back!

Teachers and Staff members at schools are feeling helpless and powerless about something that they can easily control if they just knew how. If you’re in there you can be some sort of moderation in the process. If you know what’s going on you might also be able to improve in some way. You can’t see these things as a negative, and you have to look at it in a positive light and try to stay on top of these things!

 I have moved to teachingtalia.com!

Jenny is away because it’s her daughter’s wedding on Saturday. Fiona was the sub, and she continued what Jenny had been doing all week- testing.

In my non-contact time in the morning I put together the kids ‘brain books’. This shows their progress of learning about the brain so far this term and moves into smart pizza as well.

We finished off a reflection sheet from the smart pizza activities that we did yesterday. The majority of kids understood about circling the faces to represent how they felt about an activity. Some kids circled two if they liked it (the smiley and the straight line) which I guess could indicate that they were in between? Some circled the sad and smiley faces- this was just confusing and they told me either one or the other when I asked them about it later.

Jenny organised a bit of a card for me, which I got the kids to stick bits onto and write their names in after they’d finished. Don’t you just love writing cards to yourself?

We did rotations after first break, here’s how they went.

Memory:  They’ve played memory before and so it was easy because I didn’t have to explain it or anything, just re-cap the rules. I was thinking it would be good to maybe modify it a bit so that they can learn and see how that happens,but I couldn’t think of a simple mod, so I left it.

Playdough: I’ve made playdough a few times, but this time instead of just writing their own names I thought it would be a bit more challenging to get them to write someone else’s name. They sort of did. They copied off the name tag dolphins, which was fine. It was what I expected them to do. The thing I find with the playdough though is that they like to make things with it, not write them, and so they get distracted easily.  Perhaps doing this when there are two adults would be good so that more of an eye can be kept on them? Or maybe even LETTING them make things out of it- surely that’s a good motor skill?

Letter H picture match: Starts With H: They quite liked this one (the pictures in this document might be a little off center… beware!). I had to be with the kids quite a lot for this one- sounding out all the words for them because they weren’t getting it before I did that. But that’s okay. A lot of kids really enjoyed it and got the majority right which is a good thing! The reason I did H is because we had just done the letter H earlier in the week for Letterland and I wanted to make it relevent for them.

Connex Stuff: SO many kids like puzzles and they had shown that to me in the smart pizza stuff we did yesterday. So I decided to make something similar part of the rotation. I noticed the other day that there are big blocks and those pieces of stuff that connect (I am calling them connex) in boxes. I thought that was using the same idea of puzzles- creating things, solving problems etc., but in something different to what they had done other times. They would have liked more time on this, I can tell, but a few kids really got into it and managed to make things in the time they had. Andre made a cube, just without the front and back which I thought was rather impressive. He had told me that he was going to make a square earlier when we were explaining it, and it was good to see him actually do it and they way that he did was interesting as well.

For the smart pizza ‘rotations’ that I’d been doing I was afraid that the kids might start to get confused between that and normal rotations. So this afternoon when I did smart pizza rotations I  put an “X” on the board instead of a Cross. This made it nice and clear for them. I think this was a good idea.

The activities that I chose for smart pizza this week were in the same smart categories, just different activities. I did this because I wanted to see if they chose and liked activities because it was fun for them, or because they were actually smart in that area.

We did snap, collage, writing a book, and shape jumping. I am yet to go through what they actually did and whether it was the same as last time, but it will be interesting to find out. I ran out of time for the smart pizzas a bit, and so I thought that I would finish that off properly tomorrow.

Overall feeling of today: *nods head* yep, pretty good.

I started the day by reading “The Rainbow Fish” by Marcus Pfister. I ‘read’ the book using just the pictures first, and then read the words. This took up a fair amount of time, but it was a really good book to get them thinking about sharing. Lately in their play I had been noticing people snatching and not wanting to share, and so I thought this was a good book to read to them to highlight how good it is to share. We brainstormed briefly what we can do to share during our play, and they responded well. I think they got it.

We had snack early and then got stuck into play. Once again I was running the show and it was pretty hectic. After first break Jenny told me that some girls had asked to paint themselves, this sent her on an expedition to get face paint, or at least permission to use regular paint. We got a thumbs up for the second option, and so got to it. It was fun, and quite therapeutic to paint their faces. Some of them weren’t the best, but I realised that they were probably better then some other people could do.

The kids really enjoyed being animals (they always do). The only problem is that it causes a few problems later in the day, when we’re not animals anymore. Today it didn’t though, which was good. I think it was because they were doing more structured things, but with a bit of flexibility. There wasn’t an option to be like an animal, and the things they COULD do were interesting enough to keep them occupied.

After second break I did my Smart Pizza Choices A lesson. It went REALLY well. I was so happy with the way that they just rotated though them themselves and didn’t make it difficult or anything like that. I took lots of notes and things, which was good. It was interesting that some kids chose to stay at the one thing practically the whole time, and others changed through them all, and again some changed only once. I will do the reflection part of the lesson tomorrow- this was Jenny’s recommendation, and what I’m going to do.

I think today, as a whole was one of my best days.Today we did letterland as a whole class. This worked MUCH better then doing it in the rotations. I set aside a whole hour to do it in, not including packing up time, and they used it all.

We went through it at the beginning and brainstormed words and read the story which wasn’t so good this week, but that doesn’t matter. I wasn’t sure if his name had been changed. Even though I have the sheet I forgot to check in the morning. I just used the name given- Hairy Hat Man, and that worked fine.

Their brainstorming is getting better, but they really need to be reminded to check if it has the ‘h’ sound at the start, before they give their word. Most of the time the kids are able to tell each other what letter it really starts with, which is good.

Some kids are a bit slow to get it all together- Mattie and James aren’t the quickest, but their work gets done in the end. Ben is always lightning fast, and a couple of others were fast today as well- I asked them to cut out another, different thing from the magazine, because H is an easy one- there’s lots of heads and hair in them!

After the official letterland I handed out a sheet with lots of words on it. They had to circle the words that had H in them. I was really a but unsure how they’d go with this, but I think they coped really well. Some people got it better then others, but most people could recognise a H and circle that. The problem was that some people just circled the H, and not the word, and therefore circled words that had a H IN then, not that started with a H.

They seemed to really enjoy this activity, so I might consider doing letterland separate again in the future and to do something like that after again. Recognising what letters look like is all part of early reading (which I am learning more about) and so it’s beneficial for them.

Rotations I thought went well today. I had exactly an hour, because of library, and so they were only short rotations. I tried to use a few different smarts and get them using different parts of their brains for each activity. I had planned to do up some smart pizza ’slices’ and display them at each activity so that they could see what smart they were being, but ran out of time last night because I went to work. :-(

Each activity, bar the mothers day card, fitted in really well time wise. The children seemed to like the ‘jump shape’ activity, so I might do that again some time. There was a collision between Malakie and Ben, but it was all looked after. I took observational notes during the rotations and they’re available on the next page.

Library time went reasonable well. It is always chaotic trying to teach the preppies computer things, but they do it surprisingly well. I was surprised at the range of ability, though I suppose I shouldn’t be. In my previous experience computer knowledge is always like that, no matter what age group you’re with. It’s really interesting to bring down to as basic as writing your name, and it was almost a little frustration to have to work with kids who had no idea what ‘a’ was. I know that it’s hard with the capital letters on the keyboard, but they will have to learn that. I knew that that would happen though and so I did compensate for it during letterland by showing them the capital H and the little h.

Tahlia was really good at typing her name, and so I taught her how to hold down the shift key to do a capital letter. I considered teaching them caps lock, letter, caps lock, but decided against it. It’s not that hard to hold down the shift key, and they have two hands, so that’s not an issue- hand span wise. It’s easier to learn that was, it saves you learning something new again when you’re in an older grade. And Tahlia got it right and was fine doing capitals, so I’m not worried. The problem is that now I have to stay consistent, if I start telling them that there are two ways they will get confused and that won’t be good.

Malakie is a smart boy (and incredibly naughty). He listened to what I told Tahlia, and then copied me. I shook my head in amazement when I saw what he’d done, and congratulated him. Jenny and I spoke afterwards about maybe doing some extension things for him. I had the though of him maybe going into the Chris’ class so that he could do some prep/1 stuff. That might seem like I’m trying to get him out of my class though. :-P

After lunch I we finished off the mothers day cards. That went well- some kids went over board with the glitter (as you have to expect some will), but it went well. The cards were nifty I thought, and I will use the idea up in kids church this weekend as well.

We also did a clean up after lunch which always seems to need to be done.

There was an incident in the playground that Linda told Jenny and I about. I wasn’t sure what happened and asked Jenny if she would like to talk to them about it. She said it would be good for me to have a go at it, so I did. I was a little scared when she said that, and lost my mind for a few seconds trying to think what I would do. Jen suggested I ask the kids what happened, so I did.

I think that the process that I went through with them was okay. I know that when I was doing that I was excluding the majority of the class from participating in the conversation, but they could listen. I did try to include them a bit more by asking what we could do as a class to help them make better choices next time. This worked well with people suggesting other games and things. I also tried to build up a sense of friendship in our class and caring by asking who would allow one of these boys to play with them if they wanted to make a good choice about their play. Everyone said they would let them play with them, so that finished it off well.

I really need to think of a new way to get the children’s attention, because I am sick of clapping my hands all the time. I am reading through some behaviour management strategies and trying to implement them. One I remembered from my primary school days was that when the teacher put their hand up everyone else in the class had to put their hand up and shut their mouths. Over the last few days last week and this week I’ve been teaching them that. Today I felt like it worked really well- other days they’ve forgotten to do it etc. It seems to work well, and I don’t have to yell, a good thing because I am loosing my voice a little bit! Another one I tried yesterday and today is getting them to put their hands on their head when they are finsihed and ready to learnt the next thing. They’re getting there, but still need to work on this a bit.

I FINALLY remembered to say ‘Good afternoon’ before dismissing them today. I have remembered the last few days, but forgot all of the first week and half of the second week. I am slowly learning!!

So today was a good day. I felt a bit more on top of it, and more in control. I also felt like I was more able to do things on the spot as well, which is good.

Once or twice a week I do rotations with the kids.

Here are my lesson plans for the first week: Rotations Plan Week 1

The second week A: Rotations Plan Week 2, A

And the second week B: Rotations Plan Week 2, B

Enjoy the ideas etc. and let me know what works for you.

Monday morning Jenny was away and so I had the run of the class. I knew that an obstacle course had been set up outside, that’s what we usually do on Monday mornings, and so the sub and I ran through that in the morning, after a little introduction. I was amazed at how she didn’t really know what was going on. I guess in this situation it’s a bit hard, becuase I am here acting like the teacher and they come in and it’s just a mix of different plans and different people and they don’t really know what’s going on.

So I instructed the morning and we played outside for a while to burn off some crazy energy that they had. Break and into play planning and play.

Play went well- Linda was out with the cafe in the morning and she taught them about setting the table etc. this was really great, and I think that with play I should try and do more of that. I was a bit lost to be honest when it came to the cafe. There is SO much work in play that I never realised was there!

We kept playing after lunch, and then stopped because we had heard that the buddies were coming down to finish off the friendship posters. Only a few came down, which meant that I had about half the class still on the carpet. I couldn’t send them off to play because the buddies took up a lot of space and so I had to do a bit of improv. We read a book about George which I knew they had read before and liked. I think that it’s important to read the same books multiple times so that they know how the book works and become familiar with. Besides, if they like it, it will keep them occupied and the more they listen to it the more and more they will understand the lessons in it. An important part of any story.

After second break we had to spend time making a kindness chain. That went well. I had printed out things that they had though up about what kindness is and then made stips of paper out of them. They were good at colouring them in, and again, very quick! We coloured both sides, otherwise it would look very white, and we put it together and it was all good.