Setting Up My First Classroom!

I was busy, busy in July (before I left for the summer) and again at the end of August setting up my very first classroom. As you can see, it was a bit squishy trying to fit seating for 31 little year 3 (grade 2) bodies in my room. 

The silhouette pictures hanging from my ceiling were made on our transition day in July. My new students each wrote a 'self' poem inside the shape of the head and then drew pictures of things they like (or just designs) around the outsides. They looked very cute once all hung up! I double sided the pictures and clipped them up with colourful clothes pegs. 

More desks!
Also, the orange board ready for our classroom rules and children's leaves to create a class tree.

Hard to see, but on the far wall next to the window is our class marble jar (picture). We earn marbles for our class for being excellent as a whole class (each of the marbles has a specific behaviour such as, being complemented by an adult, doing it the first time, working silently, etc.). I will fish it out and take a better picture later.

"We are ravenous readers" reading ladder. Children recorded their reading in their reading logs, and got to move their name up the leaves each time they finished a book.

Our 'Space Race' behaviour management system. Children move up the board for good behaviour and earn house points. Children who reach the 'Golden Globe' planet at the top are sent home with a special certificate for top notch behaviour. Consequently, children move across the board for undesirable behaviour. The first planet to the right is a warning, followed by a timeout in class, a timeout in a partner class, and finally being sent to the head teacher. 

This resource was created by my very lovely coworker, Mrs. T.

My tiny classroom library! This classroom did not have a class library prior to my arrival. It was very important to me that my students had a place to find an interesting book to read within the classroom. Aside from the dictionaries on the bottom and part of the middle row, and a small number of topic related books, the rest of these books I brought with me on the airplane from Canada. Our little library was small enough to separate into fiction, non-fiction, and topic books.

So, there is the whistle stop tour of my classroom from September 2014. If you have any questions about resources you have seen please leave a comment and I will get back to you!

June is for Interviews

March, April and May I must have repressed from my memory, for all I remember is having two weekly recurring supply jobs in the most horrific classes imaginable.

In June, my agency called me with an interview for a job from September to Christmas - covering a maternity leave.

In England a teaching interview involves planning and teaching a lesson, which is observed by the headteacher and whomever else is involved in the hiring process. Afterwards, you have a tour of the school and a sit down interview.

For this interview, I was told to plan any type of lesson I like. As I feel my strength is in literacy, I created a short lesson on parts of speech using one of my favourite poems, The Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll.

I created this notebook presentation go go along with my lesson. Clicking on the picture starts an audio reading of the poem! It takes about 10 seconds for the audio to begin after clicking.

Students searched through the poem to find examples from each part of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs.

 I created differentiated worksheets for the children to fill in, and an extension task. The extension task is quite fun and gets the children to come up with a definition for two of the 'nonsense words' in the poem!

Click here for the resources! (worksheets, success criteria, poem, and poem with support)

Leave me a comment if you found this resource helpful, or if you have any questions about it!

At the end of the interview I was offered a position on the spot! Plus, instead of just working until Christmas, they wanted to hire me to work for the whole school year. I was extremely excited, especially because we had just moved to a new flat that was very close to this school. I would be a year 3 teacher come September.

Here are some snaps of the new flat that I would live in for the next 15 months!

Yes, that is the oven on top of the counter...

It's Dark in January

January of 2014 I began my new position teaching a year 4 class in a new school, across the country from where I used to live. I quickly discovered that teaching in the south is different than teaching in the east of England, and the children are quite rough on the south coast. 

Despite being thrown into a new curriculum, new way of teaching, and new class half way through a school year I was very excited to have a class of my own. Monty the Moose became our class mascot and flew all the way from Canada to join us. 

We started off our term by announcing to the students that we had heard of an animation competition for students. Our goal for the half term was to get the students to write their own fairy tales, and use stop motion animation to create a video of their story. 

This ended up being a great opportunity to see our students' artistic sides as we created storyboards, back drops, and characters.

My favourite activity from this half term was using fantasy setting pictures for the children to write a descriptive setting paragraph from. I jumped for joy when even one of my lower ability students came out with sentences like 'A shape like a rectangle shape in the entrance vines on the wide entrance. The thing holding up the funky poles shaped like devils horns. The forest is cold and wet creepies all around.'

While it is not grammatically correct, it was so exciting to get such great ideas!

The second part of the activity involved the students reading a paragraph of descriptive setting description from the class novel we were reading (more on that later!) and were asked to use the details in the text to draw the setting on a small A4 size piece of paper. 

As a shared class novel that we based a number of our lesson on (across the year group) we used the book 'Land of Stories'  by Chris Colfer (from Glee!).

http://thelandofstories.com

The story follows two siblings as they fall into the storybook their grandmother gave to them and must complete a number of quests to get back out, meeting many storybook characters along the way.

Creating our stop motion animation was difficult. First, we didn't have enough cameras (and enough battery life) to accommodate all of the groups. Also, the students had a hard time making only small movements of characters between pictures (some of the finished products look more like tableaus). However, it was one of my favourite days in the classroom because we all had so much fun being directors!

My students were struggling to answer reading comprehension problems fully, so I created a 'Bump it Up' presentation on Notebook for them. The first example is of course from our reading of Land of Stories.

Click here to download all of the slides!

My Supply Bag

It's Saturday! I hope you are all enjoying your weekend thus far.

I am quickly coming up on my official start date, September 16th (this Monday!), so I wanted to share the contents of my supply bag with you. I finally put everything into my pretty bag this morning.

 The books I have packed in my bag include: Elementary Teacher's Discipline Problem Solver (A GREAT read, it covers almost every problem you could encounter with a student and how to solve it, in numbered steps), Super Sub (Substitute ideas and tips), 100 Ideas for Primary Supply Teachers, Five- Minute Fairy Tales (I picked this up at a local thrift shop for £1.25. I thought this would be good for days that there are no lessons left, there are many literacy activities that can be quickly thought up around fairy tales), Eenie Meenie Manitoba (A collection of Canadian poetry), Miss Nelson is Missing! (To go along with the My Teacher is Missing worksheets), and finally my map of Suffolk with all the nearby schools circled.

Here are my two sets of activities purchased from TPT. First, is the My Teacher is Missing! Sub Plan Pack created by Christina over at Second Grade Sugar and Spice. Second, is the Mystery Box activity created by Abby over at The Inspired Apple. I'm really excited to give these both a go!

Here is the mystery box I've created (It's small enough to fit in my bag to take to school every day).

My mystery box has a globe inside! I've been trying to think up clue ideas for it...so far I have 'it's round', I have some brainstorming to do tomorrow (unless any of you have ideas).

 A clip board, just in case.

Stickers! Also, sticky notes, scissors, calculator, calendar, and adorable maple leaf stamper.

Pencil case with all of the essentials.

And of course a cute lunch pail.

Well, that's my supply bag for now. Hopefully I'll survive my first week. Wish me luck, and let me know if you have any other supply teacher suggestions!

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

Jeans?

Yesterday I had a great time shopping in Watertown and going out for lunch with my Dad. Luckily my passport came back to me in time! I've been looking for some new pieces for my 'Teacher Wardrobe". I managed to find 3 nice pairs of dark wash jeans. I would like to hear the opinion of some of you who have been in the profession for a while, dark wash jeans - are these 'professional' enough to wear to work?

Today I've been working on more paperwork(When will it end?!). I scanned a number of documents including my diplomas and Visa to send to my agency, as well as application forms for my umbrella pay roll company. Due to the fact that I will essentially be a kind of 'free lance' worker under my teaching agency I need to sign up with an umbrella corporation to handle my pay roll and such. The good thing about this is that they help you get a number of deductions from your taxes (while overseas I will be responsible for paying UK taxes)including travel and accommodations. As well, the company helps to quickly set up a UK bank account for me. This is very helpful as opening a new bank account in a foreign country can be quite an ordeal(essentially, you need proof of a UK address to open the bank account, and in order to rent a flat you need to show proof of having a bank account!).

Today I also want to start scanning some of my resources to have digital copies when I go to the UK. Books can be super heavy, so instead I am planning on taking a few small hard drives with my essential school resources on them to print off when I need them. I just need to find the motivation to sit at the scanner for a few hours to get it done.

Visa's In

This morning my UK Tier 5 Youth Mobility Visa was delivered to my door. Now, not only can I finish filling out my paperwork, but I can now start looking seriously at flat rentals.

Yesterday I made a trip to Chapters to pick up the book Miss Nelson is Missing by James Marshall to go along with Second Grade Sugar and Spice's supply teacher package on TPT. It contains a number of worksheets to use for your supply teacher, or if you are a supply teacher (like I will be) and you are left without plans, or end up having extra time. The worksheets have the students compare their class with Miss Nelson's class, and among other activities have the students develop a create story about what their teacher is doing while they are away from school. I'm hoping that this will prove to be a useful resource for me.

I've been trying to get through some of my resource books before September because they are too heavy to pack and take with me. At the gym yesterday I began reading The First-Year Teacher's Survival Guide: Ready-to-Use Strategies, Tools & Activities for Meeting the Challenges of Each School Day by Julia G. Thompson. It's an informative book that includes self tests so you can see where you stand with your skills. It is an American book, so not everything inside is applicable, but it is still a good resource for the basics.