Monday Musings

It must be half-term if I'm back in the blogosphere!

This time I have visitors so am not going away apart from a long weekend, so with more time at home, I finally can get around to a cheeky blog post.

I miss the old link-ups that used to happen in the educational blog world so I'm going to make a Doodlebugs Five for Friday inspired post today.

Language Learning
One of my New Years Resolutions this year has been to learn a language. I try and motivate my class to become life-long learners and what better way to model this myself than taking on a new challenge? So far, I am far far far from fluent, yet I find myself beginning to be able to read a little and understand some of the spoken language. I mostly use the Duolingo app but there are many other options out there.

Buying a flat

Next week I am due to complete on a flat purchase, this is very exciting but means I am currently very poor money-wise and have a long list of things to sort out (like furniture and utilities!) It seemed like such a good plan when I had it earlier this year, but oh what a lot of work its turned out to be! Still, its a gorgeous little property and I can't wait for it to be officially mine!!

New experiences

A couple of weeks ago I went to a cooking class with some friends to learn how to make Xiao Long Bao (pork soup dumplings). Long-time readers of the blog might remember how I have mentioned Din Tai Fung is my favourite restaurant, well there is absolutely no danger of them hiring me as a chef! It did taste nice though. 

More holidays
Since I last posted I went to Portugal over the summer and fell in love with all the tiles (would have bought some for the new if I could have figured out how to fit them all in my suitcase!)

New class
And finally, something more teaching related, my lovely new class! I am still in Reception/Kindergarten and loving the new little characters I have. There is a wider range of abilities than I'm used to, but everyone is a hard-worker and cute as a button! Let's hope they don't forget everyone with a week off now!

Five for February

So for the first time this year, I am joining in a link up! And I'm picking Doodle Bugs' Five for Friday.

1

I started the term with a couple of weeks on Space and the result of a Maths craftivity making rockets out of 2D shapes and some experimentation with marbling inks and their effects to make planets, was this display.

2

As part of learning about Chinese New Year, we read the story 'The Great Race' and made a small world version for the children to use to retell the story. Though if I'm honest they most just took the rat around the classroom...

3

In the Messy Play area, we had cooked noodles and various tongs and chopsticks to experiment with. Only one child tried to eat it so I consider it a success!

4

This idea was part of the parent activity afternoon we had, where the parent reps from all the classes organised games and crafts for the children to do. Unfortunately I forgot to take photos of the finished firework pictures.

5

The excitement of this term is the introduction of some letters to begin learning to write our names. Look at this beautiful curly caterpillar! 

Throwback - Chinese New Year

Chinese New Year is very early this year, meaning that we have an extremely short half-term (3 weeks!) followed by a rather long 7 weeks until Easter. Still the Year of the Rooster will be properly celebrated with some old favourites and new ideas (adapted to my slightly younger age-group). To kick-start your ideas here is a throwback post to last year...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Original post - 5th February 2016

A CNY-themed Five for Friday link-up today. Why not head over to DoodleBugs and see what everyone else has been up to this week?

1

Chinese New Year is a big big deal where I currently teach and the school is having a CNY rotation of activities organised by the parents, so I am actually scaling back what I would normally do so as not to take away from their efforts.

My posts from previous years about CNY ideas can be found:
here
and here

I also have a freebie on offer here.

2

I needed a really simple card as with a really tight timetable, unfortunately I didn't have time to do anything overly complicated. This year is the year of the monkey, so I adapted an idea from Adele Jeunette.

3

We made a wishing tree display as a writing focus, using the sentence starter 'I wish' to encourage some use of the recently learnt digraphs! Chinese people have orange trees for luck and prosperity and sometimes write wishes on them. There were some incredibly aspirational wishes ("I wish for diamonds"... please share with your teacher if you find some!) but also some very thoughtful ones.

4

My teaching assistant is a whiz at creative activities and she helped the children to make these beautiful blown ink and finger painted cherry blossom pictures.

5

Chinese New Year wouldn't be complete without plenty of themed books to share with the children. Click on the books for the links to Amazon.

 

 

More 5 for Friday-ing

Managing another link up for Five for Friday with Doodle Bugs Teaching, somehow keeping going through the end-of-term madness!

1

Last week my kids were looking at dinosaurs as part of our Fantasy Lands theme. Here is some independent free writing from one of my boys. So proud of his phonic skills (and dino knowledge!). 

2

Using our small world dinosaurs to do some printing in clay, even a week later, they are the most popular 'exhibit' in the Investigation Area.

3

For pirate week, a game of pin the patch on the pirate was the source of much hilarity!

4

Ready for when we learn about Superheroes, this website by DC Kids is going to be the hook for our guided writing next week!

5

And somehow in-between all this fantasy learning, we squeezed in a quick Father's Day craft!

What have you been up to this week?

Five for Photo Friday

This week I am linking up with Doodlebugs for Five for Friday and I am going to be showing five of my recent displays (did I mention the super regular display schedule my new school has?!) for our minibeast and garden topic...

1

Beginning of topic research, the children looked through information books and each chose a different minibeast to paint.

2

After reading 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar' we made paper plate lifecycles of a butterfly.

3

Moving onto frogs, the children researched and wrote facts. Of course, we painted jumping frogs too!

4

For snail week, we used Kandinsky's Concentric Circles and Matisse's Snail to inspire our artwork. I highly recommend the book 'Snail Trail' by Jo Saxton to set up this project.

5

The result of a recent Zoom In using spider's webs. In front are some junk models of minibeasts.

CNY 2016

A CNY-themed Five for Friday link-up today. Why not head over to DoodleBugs and see what everyone else has been up to this week?

1

Chinese New Year is a big big deal where I currently teach and the school is having a CNY rotation of activities organised by the parents, so I am actually scaling back what I would normally do so as not to take away from their efforts.

My posts from previous years about CNY ideas can be found:
here
and here

I also have a freebie on offer here.

2

I needed a really simple card as with a really tight timetable, unfortunately I didn't have time to do anything overly complicated. This year is the year of the monkey, so I adapted an idea from Adele Jeunette.

3

We made a wishing tree display as a writing focus, using the sentence starter 'I wish' to encourage some use of the recently learnt digraphs! Chinese people have orange trees for luck and prosperity and sometimes write wishes on them. There were some incredibly aspirational wishes ("I wish for diamonds"... please share with your teacher if you find some!) but also some very thoughtful ones.

4

My teaching assistant is a whiz at creative activities and she helped the children to make these beautiful blown ink and finger painted cherry blossom pictures.

5

Chinese New Year wouldn't be complete without plenty of themed books to share with the children. Click on the books for the links to Amazon.

 

 

First Five for Friday of 2016

OK so it's Saturday, but its about as on time as I'm ever likely to get! Time for my first link up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for 2016 (hopefully I will make it a bit more regularly than last year!)

1

Last year my TA covered a shoe box for me to make a treasure chest and I found a cheap dustbin in one of the local shops. Now with the help of some laminated coins, I can play Buried Treasure with real and made up words using the focus phonemes that week.

2

Our story this week was 'Farmer Duck' and we learnt about helping each other and working collaboratively. Here is our finished display that we collaged together!

3

At my new school, I've been introduced to a great programme called 'Hairy Phonics'. Whilst it's no Phonics Play, it is highly enjoyed by my class. They are fascinated by the hairies we collect as we practise the different graphemes and play the games. It has a fairly limited range of games, however, I do like to get it out occasionally for whole class on the interactive whiteboard or individual work on the laptops. Has a game dedicated the practise for the Year 1 Phonics Check as well. And it's currently a free app on Google Play.

4

A resource that I simply can't do without now, magnetic boards! Used multiple times a week during whole class phonics, I also have it out on a table for independent word making practise. 

5

A resource mentioned in my previous post, the Happy New Year hat (updated for this year!) courtesy of A Cupcake for the Teacher. Always fun to start off a week with a bit of hat making and a lovely way to reinforce the new year for the children. 

Now after what seems like the longest first week back after the Christmas holidays ever, I am off for a massage (discount voucher came through my post box this week, yay!)