When I lost my voice due to a virus one of my ear one students was only to happy to help me out. Here he is reading a chapter book to the rest of the class. Well it is the end of the year and what a year it has been. I feel happy in the knowledge that my children spent a year in a happy, positive learning environment. I feel I have instilled in them a love of learning and a willingness to take risks and make mistakes. I feel I have set them up for success in their future learning and hope they do well in their next few years. Below are some positive comments from parents. Term 4 was fast upon us and I thought it was time for some changes in the classroom. I realised that perhaps I was not representing the Maori culture in the classroom as much as i should and therefore made it my goal to embrace the culture even though i am still new to it myself. I have implemented some interactive window displays and more labelling. i have also updated the 5 star writing as I thought it was time for the children to move on as they are all neat writers now so we have swapped the neat writing star for spelling. i have also updated the writing display and after discussing with the children we decided to add more interesting words that we can use in our stories and the prompts to help us improve our writing. I have also moved the chairs and tables around as I think students, especially 5 year olds get bored with the same environment. In Room 25 the children are very involved in their learning. They have independent actvities, interactive displays and fun learning. Below are a few things e get up to. This week in writing we had been learning about letter writing. I thought it would be a good idea if everyone wrote a letter to someone in the class and say something nice about them. We would then post them into their pigeon holes (which I made earlier for the writing station). It occurred to me that some of the children would only write to their buddy and some children would find their pigeon hole empty, so I put all the children's names onto popsicle sticks and put them in a pot. The children then had to pick out a name and write a letter to that person. I explained that even though they didn't play with that person they could still write something nice about them. It worked really well, the children were very engaged, they loved the secrecy of it (not letting on who they were writing too) and we got some lovely letters. Needs less to say there was mass excitement at the end of the school day when they went to their pigeon hole to collect their letter. I felt I had created a collaborative, inclusive activity which everyone was involved in. Photographs of classroom at the beginning of the year and with the children's work after one term. |
AboutThis blog is a journal of my teaching and learning journey. For previous evidence see BT 2014 folder for paper evidence. Categories
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