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...

February is Chinese New Year...and a lot of changes!

I found myself starting off February newly single again and in the middle of a friendship skirmish. I found that I had moved across the country for two people who now were missing from my life. I was also absolutely drowning at school now. It was excellent timing for my best friend from university to move to London and invite me for a weekend visit!

We visited King's Cross train station and I attempted to escape to Hogwarts.

I was much too excited to visit the Harry Potter store. 

 After we found out we couldn't go to wizarding school, we toured around London for the day.

The next morning we woke up early to go to the Chinese New Year parade. It was an exciting year, as it is year of the horse (which my friend and I both are).

It is hard to see parades when you are short.

Overall a great weekend! The good news continued when previously said friendship issue was resolved upon my return to Portsmouth. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for school.

My school had been telling me since I began that they would be providing support for me in my position that I had yet to hear even word of. I had some very lovely coworkers who were helping me the best that they could. 

In England teachers are required to mark each piece of work students complete, every day. This includes an assessment of whether they have achieved their learning objective (which must be displayed to the children during lesson - something I was still unfamiliar with), a note of something they did well, and next steps for the child. As you can imagine, this took up the majority of my waking hours (especially as I was still getting used to the way in which I was expected to mark). I was marking books on the train on the way to work, in my classroom before school, during my lunch break, after school, on the train home, and on my couch at home until I went to bed. Then there was lesson planning (which, luckily, was a shared responsibility with my year group partners and I). On top of this I had a class full of behaviour issues and children who were angry that their teacher had left them midway through a year. I'm not one to complain, but I was absolutely floundering. 

Despite these issues, I showed up to school everyday happy to have my own class to teach and trying my absolute hardest to stay above the water. 

To understand the state my school was in you would need to be familiar with OFSTED (which is a 'they who must not be named' kind of situation for teachers in the UK). OFSTED is a governing body for education in the UK. They come and visit schools for 3 days at a time, watch lessons, look through books, test scores, records, interview staff, students and leadership and make a judgement on that school that is written in a report and posted to the public. Schools are rating on a scale of 1-4 (1 being outstanding, and 4 being inadequate). Most schools are in constant fear of an OFSTED inspection, especially if they are already judged as a 3 or 4. My school was a 4 and expecting an inspection soon.

This was causing a lot of stress across the staff. We had recently acquired a new head teacher who was good at her job, but very abrupt. She did a surprise drop in to one of my lessons and at the end of the day came in to my room, told me that I had potential but that the school didn't have time to give me the support I needed and that I wouldn't be coming back to teach on Monday. My deputy head teacher acknowledged that they had not given me the support or information that I deserved. It was obviously hard to hear, and shook me quite a bit - I had never been let go from a position before in my life!

I called my supply agency to explain what had happened, and they told me that this kind of thing happens all the time! She very kindly told me that they would take care of me and I was immediately put back on the supply list. 

To this day I am so thankful that I had already booked my trip to Rome (which took place two weeks after this incident) before this happened. If I hadn't, I was ready to pack it in and move back to Canada that next day. I would have missed out on so many more great adventures!

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 New Job!

Hello everyone! I have yet to receive a call into work this morning, giving me the perfect opportunity to FINALLY make a blog post!

I have some very exciting news to share: as of Januray 6th I will be a year 4 teacher!!! (equivalent to grade 3 in Canada/US). I am also moving. Tomorrow. Across the country. Mind you, the country isn't huge but I will be travelling about 5 hours to the lovely city of Portsmouth.

Then, on Sunday I am boarding a plane for Canada to come home for Christmas - talk about a busy week!

I am very excited and nervous to have my own classroom. I had the opportunity a few weeks ago to observe in my new class for a few days, all my new students seem very sweet and the staff are all very friendly and helpful. Here is a pic of the front of my new room. (Note the One Direction advent calendar on the floor under the chart paper!)

I'm sure I'll be posting more frequently now that I'm going to be putting resources together for my walls and working on getting my guided reading groups ready (any ideas for guided reading activities would be greatly appreciated!).

Here is my funny story for the week:

I was teaching a year 1 class this week that I've had several times before. While making a frame around their picture of themselves with Santa (he visited them at school last week) I had this conversation with one of my students,

Student: "That's not the real Santa, he has a watch!"

Me: "Santa can't have a watch?"

Student: "No!"

Me: "Why not?"

Student: "Because it makes him look silly."

I couldn't help but laugh because he was so serious about it.

I hope you are all having a great last day(s) at school and that you have a (relatively) stress free holiday!

I'm Still Alive!

Hello there! I know it's been forever since I've made a post (Sorry!), I have been so busy with my first few weeks of work, and I've been neglecting taking pictures.

Teaching has been going well so far, I am getting a lot of positive feedback! My agency had a workshop and social evening yesterday to allow us an opportunity to meet the other Canadian, Australian, and Irish teachers. As I was talking with my consultant, he told me that one of the schools I've worked for only requests me now when they call!

The supply situation here is very different than back in Canada. Each school board does not have a specific 'supply list' that they must offer jobs to first and do in a particular manner. Here, each school has their own person in charge of obtaining cover teachers, and they may pull from any agency. If you as a cover teacher do a good job and the school really likes you, they will call your agency and request you personally.

I'm quite proud of the fact that I've been able to attain this status at a school after only being there for two different days.

I was also called in to a secondary school this past week (cue the horror movie music). I'd been told a lot of negative things about secondary schools and students from people I know around my area, so I was really nervous going in to it. Luckily, I emerged unscathed and the school even wanted to hire me full time at the end of the day. My consultant kindly declined on my behalf (cue sigh of relief).

I've been doing some fun non-teaching related activities as well. Last weekend my housemate and I took a trip into Norwich, where I finally tried eating at a Nando's (which is a big chain here, and I believe there are a few in Canada too - and the USA). Of course, I've also been to a few pubs... you know to, um, experience the culture...

I haven't taken any pictures this week, but last week I did manage to finally find the Lowestoft beach, so I will share a few of those pictures with you.

This is the paved area leading to the boardwalk. There are fountains in the ground that shoot straight up in different patterns.

This wind turbine reminds me of home.

Well, there you have it! I hope to be back to blogging more frequently now. I hope you all enjoy the rest of your weekends!

Worldly Wednesday: Norwich, Norfolk

Last Friday Nan and I travelled to Norwich to meet my agency consultant to meet in person for the first time. Norwich is about a 40 minute trip on the train from where I live (Oulton Broad), and we left at a decent time in the morning.

Here are some pictures from the train.

The night before we left, we had written down Google Maps directions to get from the train station to the agency. Of course, we got lost. Luckily, we've met some very friendly people who were helpful in giving directions. We finally made it to the agency and had a lovely chat with my consultant.

Afterwards, we took a stroll through the market place, which was on a pedestrianized road lined with shops.

My consultant had told us about Norwich Castle and how we should visit it if we had the time.

On our way up to the castle!

The castle has been turned into a museum, so, there is a 'castle' part of the museum as well as displays of art, animals, and history.

This is a very large tea pot.

Here are instructions on how to don a toga. They even had togas to practice with. Of course I had to try it out too! Unfortunately the togas were only made for small people, oh well.

Going into the castle!

This is the entrance to the stairwell (one of those narrow twisty ones)

 Heading down the stairs (I started to feel claustrophobic half way down).

 In the basement of the castle they showed different types of prison set-ups and torture devices.

Here are some pictures from the balcony of the keep.

Look at the brave knight!

Here is a shot from the top of the well that was in the castle.

Inside the castle they had a smaller diorama of what the castle would have looked like back when it was in use.

Here is one of the many arrow slits in the walls.

Beautiful stained glass windows.

I took this photo walking back to the train station as we crossed a bridge, what a view!

That's all for this weeks

I hope you enjoyed my pictures from Norwich! I look forward to reading about what you all have been up to. Please link up below, and have a great week (you're half-way there!).