What I have to show for nine weeks for being a New Entrant teacher.

Last Saturday I went to school and put up the last of the children's artwork that I had not yet had a chance to put up.  Sounds strange.... with it being the last week of school and all.... but I only had this class for nine weeks and I wanted to see eight weeks of work on full display before I took it all down in Week 9 to send it home and turn the children's bedrooms into mini art galleries.

Firstly, standing at my desk, I did a panoramic shot of my class.  I had also scrubbed the tables clean of PVA glue, so they are gleaming.

B is for bear and B is for bee.  I'm so proud of the work we did in the first week.

D is for dinosaur.  I got this off Pinterest and was a good one for following instructions and getting things glued on accurately.  Originally we were going to do dragons... but then my cousin, Susan, a long time NE teacher and now RTLit said (after I had done S) not to focus on words that start with blends.

D is for dabbing dots on d.  Another inspired by Pinterest and it got the children using a paint brush in a different way.

N is for numbers.  Another simple idea I got from Pinterest.  It also helps children put numbers in order and practice their gluing skills.  While the examples I saw on Pinterest used capital letters, I focused on teaching the students lower case letters.

T is for turkey.  Again this was an activity to teach the children gluing on and spacial awareness.  T is for tree.  It is important to give the students the opportunity to draw what they see for themselves.  T is for taniwha.  T is for tui.  For these two communal activities we were learning to "colour inside the fence" with crayons and then use long brush strokes to dye the picture.  Some students needed to be taught how to not keep stroking in the same place.

T is for tiger.  We made the tigers from paper plates and I got them to paint both sides as I envisaged them hanging.  We looked at a picture of a tiger when we put it all together and used white crayon before we glued on the black stripes.  We used white wool for the whiskers.

S is for snake.  We started off with the ideas of putting a pattern on the snake.... but these kids weren't very good at colouring patterns that repeat with crayon.... it was a bit above them.  And then we used dye.  I cut out the snakes and glued them on coloured paper and cut them out again.  Then I cut different coloured shapes and after we had done some patterning with beads on thread, and other materials, the children had more of an idea on patterning and were able to make a two colour/shape pattern and glue it on the back of their snake.

S is for sheep.  An idea inspired by a former colleague in 2014, Kimberley, when she was a BT.  Finally found an opportunity to use it.  Two learnings from this: don't make your sheep so big because you use so many cotton wool balls; this would be a better activity when teaching blends - sh.  Thanks for that tip Susan!

S is for strawberry.  We looked at and discussed the strawberries before we drew the strawberries and then we ate them.  Again, this would be a better activity for str.  S is for sweetcorn.  I bought the sweetcorn for our class garden.  We discussed what it looked like and then we drew it.  Again... sw probably would be best for this activity.

This is an idea I got off Pinterest in 2014.  So I made it for my new class in term three 2014.  I did not use all of the cards this time.  I went for a few to keep it simple.

A is for ambulance.  We were visiting by Daniel from St Johns in Week 1 and the following week we were doing the letter A, the short one.  A is for apple  So I made a study of apples.  I purchased five different varieties of apple for us to discuss, examine, draw and colour.  I love their apples.  Then I had also found an awsome apple in an a activity on Pinterest.

G is for garden.  For this one I wanted to introduce the children to using scissors themselves.  So I drew a whole pile of flowers in pencil, gave one of each colour to the students and asked them to cut it out.  I cut out the yellow centre, stalks and leaves, but this gave the flowers a more individual look.  I first got them to draw a flower garden on blue paper using crayon to give this depth.  Then we glued the flowers over the top.

G is for goose.  Another cool as idea I got off Pinterest.... but I was up to after 2:00am cutting out 144 feathers and sorting them into twelve individual snaplock bags so each child would have a variety of colours.  My original intent was to also discuss the various textures of the paper.  But we had some difficulty doing this as two of my special needs students were somewhat distracting.  As you can see we had a variety of individuality in how the feathers were stuck on.

M is for mouse.  Another inspired by Pinterest and getting the students to glue on and be aware of space.  The original Pin uses a capital M so I adapted it to a lower case m.

 N is for nest.  This inspiration came from a staffroom discussion.  So I found some simple birds on Google images, printed them out, gave the children water colour paints to paint their birds and then we went off looking for things in the school grounds to make nests with.  A bit of PVA glue and waahlaa, we have a nest for our birds.

This was delightful to see as we went off to collect nest materials....

D is for dog.  This was our Art & Craft day focus.  We put together all the skills we had been learning for the term:  crayon and dye, long brush strokes for both paint and dye, gluing on, cutting out (they cut out their spots for their dogs).

M is for me.  On the first day of school for the term, I tried to get them to draw a picture of themselves in crayon.  It was a failure.  But later in the term I decided to try again.  So here they are in crayon with dye.

M is for monster.  This activity was all about getting the children to cut out their own shapes.  I was trying to teach them some tricks like folding the paper in half and how to draw the shape before cutting.  I also was trying to teach them how to hold the big side and cut off the small side.  All those things we take for granted when cutting.

L is for lemon.  We had already drank lemonade and sucked on lollipops, so I brought in a lemon off our tree and we looked at it and discussed it before cutting it in half, sniffing it and drawing it.  Later I squeezed it out and we tasted the juice.  Lots of good oral language and very impressive detail of the features of the lemon.

P is for pig.  Paper plates were my inspiration for this.  We painted our pigs pink.  I cut out ears and noses for them to paint too.  We glued on the ears and under the nose is a thick piece of corrogated cardboard to make the nose "stand out" from the face.  White and brown circles for the eyes along with black buttons, and the nose is finished off with two pink buttons for the nostrils.

This is the teachery stuff at the front of the classroom: thinking hats, months of the year and days of the week, colours, visual timetable, the calendar, number of the day and all that.

We made a Christmas tree.

These were our Super Acts of Kindness.  On the last day we took them all down, sorted them and sent them home.

These are the toys I purchased for the play based aspect of my class....

And from the outside of my class, I photographed the plants we have grown this term for the children to take home.  We grew a sunflower plant each and the seed tray has four pea plants and a basil and corriander plant.... that's if all the seeds germinated!

We took regular photos to record the growth of our plants.

This is our class garden.  We planted a tomato plant, marigolds, basil, peas and sweetcorn.  The mint and gladiolus were already in place.

I am so proud of what we achieved in our short time together.  I learnt a lot.  I hope they learned a lot too!!

Celebrating some of the extras at a country school!

I grew up in the country, attending two small rural schools (with two classes) until going to a big city high school with 1200+ students.  I've spent most of my teaching career in small rural schools with 2-5 classrooms and most of the time it has been wonderful.  So I wanted to celebrate in this post what I love about rural education.

School Gardens:

Most schools have them now, but the difference between a town school and a country school is how they come about.  Most town schools are big enough to have a grounds keeper/caretaker, who often take an active role in the gardens and help construct and maintain them.  At the school in these photos below, apart from the lawnmower contractor, there is no grounds keeper.  All work on the gardens is down by parent volunteers and working bees. 

At some point, prior to my arrival at the school, gardens had been put in.  In my second year there, a parent and I decided to work together with my class to make the gardens even more special.  The children did quite a bit of the construction themselves, but when it came to getting those blue barrels to stay put, we got a local farmer with building experience and his son to come in and help problem solve that one.

Agricultural Day:

Agricultural Day, also known as Ag Day, Calf Club and Pet Day, is a highlight of the school year for me.  I had eight years of taking a calf to Calf Club as a child, and along with the fond memories of a warm, snuggly calf and lots of ribbons, I also remember my mum nagging me to go out and feed her and brush her.

On the day there are kids proudly showing of their calves, lambs and goats.  You can tell the kids with the great love for their animals as they take them for walks around the grounds or hang out with them where they are tied up, ensuring they eat and drink.  There is also the raffles, the cake stalls, the sausage sizzle, the over consumption of fizzy drink, the excitement of seeing ribbons handed out and the odd run away pet.

I like to know that the children in my class know their animals well and how to look after them, so I always give out this homework project leading up to the day.  Here are two of the projects that stood out to me one year.

Flower Show:

When I was a child we also had Flower Show day with Calf Club.  So the day before the Calf Club we would bring bucket loads of flower arranging bits and pieced to school and try to enter everything possible.  The next day, after tying up our calves, we would rush into the classroom to check out if we had won any prizes. 

Flower Shows are slowly becoming a thing of the past, but a few years ago I was at a school who did one, and thankfully not the day before Calf Club.

Some of the categories include:

• unusual container
• egg cup posie
• buttonhole
• sand saucer
• miniature garden
• flower in a jar
• fruit and vegetable creature

Some schools also include sections for baking of specific items.

A Day at the Snow:

At some schools it is becoming an annual fixture to have a day at the snow.  It gives some children the opportunity to see snow for the first time.  For other children it gives them the chance to try out skiing or snowboarding, and those who have been before to extend and build on what they know.

Three years ago the school I was at planned a whole school excursion for the day to Whakapapa on Mt Ruapehu.  A fair chunk of the school went.  I will tell you straight up that I do not ski or snowboard, and given I have the dodgiest ankle and knew due to netball injuries I did not get treated for properly when I was very young and bullet proof, I did not even attempt skiing.  However, some of the mums and kids and I had fun riding the chairlift, making snowmen and snow angels, and sampling all the cafes.  And as you can see, I did occasionally take a photo.

Shows that come to school:

We get some hard case shows.  This one was Rosie the Cow from Dairy NZ I think.  Half of our students at this school came from dairy farms, the other half from sheep and beef farms and contractors.  At rural schools the visiting performers are really important because for some schools it is quite a trek to get into a theatre performance.

Guy Fawkes Day:
When I was a kid the communities of the schools I went to had a family Guy Fawkes evening.  It had a bonfire and families could bring a guy to put on it.  The dads would set off the fireworks.  And back in my day, we had Tom Thumbs and Double Happies, and if we were lucky the paddock had been freshly eaten out by cows who had left a lot of fresh cow dung on the ground which was ripe for exploding with a Double Happy and some poor unsuspecting parent with their back to the dung which showered them. 

Alas, we no longer have Tom Thumbs or Double Happies, but there is the odd community that still carries on the tradition of the family Guy Fawkes evening.

In the spirit of that, the community I was in a few years ago inspired us to have a Guy Making Day.  We set the kids up in teams and parents came to help and there was an awful lot of problem solving that took place.  We had two judges (a husband of a teacher and an ex-pupil who loves coming back to help out) and a really fun day.

By the way, not all the guys were burned - some of the kids couldn't bear to see their creations go up in smoke that weekend.

Kids for Kids Choir:
When I was a kid, there were music festivals held in two of the two towns closest to our school at the intermediates.  All the schools in the district practised and practised and then gave two or three performances as one large choir.

Scoot ahead to my grown up years, and this did not happen anymore.

But then World Vision and Suzanne Prentice came up with Kids for Kids Choir.  The resources are sent out to the school, the teachers school the kids up on the songs, and then we perform with many other schools for a night after a practise held during the day.  I've had this experience with three different schools now and it always is spectacular.

And the thing about doing this in a small rural school is that even the five year olds are involved (and they look so cute trying to stay awake on stage)!

Celebrating the Chiefs:
The great thing about being in a small rural school is the flexibility you have.  So when the Chiefs got into the final of the Super 15 the other year, we thought we should show them that we supported them.  So we spent a morning making posters and face painting each other and wearing our Chiefs colours.  It was fun.

We also sent letters to the Chiefs the following year to continue to show that we supported them.

Now I may have history of being a little obsessed with rugby, because one year the whole school went to the Waikato Rugby NPC Open Day to compete in the Mooloo Song competition (which we won and some of the team and One News visited our school as a result) and another time 80% of our school went to Waikato Stadium to watch the All Black Captain's Run (we got autographs and photos)!  It's all about creating memories and pride in supporting your team.

Logging Truck Safety:

Being a kid in a rural locality has its dangers.  Farms are hazardous places and so are the roads.  My last school was offered the opportunity to educate the students about logging trucks.  So we learnt how many wheels they have, how big the motor is, how heavy the truck and the loads are, and how long it will take a logging truck to brake to a stop.

This is just a snap shot of the awesome experiences rural education can have for students, teachers and families.  It is just one aspect of why I love teaching in country schools so much.