Bio Poems - with art and photography thrown in.

One night a few weeks ago, I was trawling through Twitter when I came across a tweet from the principal of Auroa School in Taranaki, @macca24129, tweeting a link to a blog of one of the classes at his school.  He was celebrating some beautiful work done by Mrs Ericsson's class, Room 6.

So I went to have a look at this blog to see what Mr Chittenden was celebrating, and I was inspired.

So right at the outset, I would like to say thanks to Heath for tweeting out this blog, and thanks to Alidia for blogging some fantastic work and inspiring my class and I.

And here is how my class made this idea our own.  Firstly we got big pieces of A2 paper.  We folded them in half side to side, top to bottom, to find the centre point of the paper.  Then we ruled lines diagonally from one corner to another to make a big cross.

I asked the children to make big, bold patterns.  I said that we would be painting our backgrounds and that fiddly patterns would be difficult.  It is still amazing how many kids don't listen to that instruction though.

The day after I put out some very brightly coloured paint:  red, yellow, orange, light blue, light and dark green, purple, pink.  The children got to painting.  I asked them to paint the background to their patterns first so that any smaller bits could be painted 'in front'.  At the end of a couple of sessions this is what some had achieved:

I really love the bold bright colours and how each pattern is different.  You may notice one that is different in the photo above, a green and yellow painting with an orange starfish in the centre; this one was done by an ORS child, so looks a bit different.  He loves painting though, so this was another opportunity to include him in the mainstream class programme directly.

Meanwhile I was also working with my kids to write their Bio Poems.  When I first started teaching, oh so long ago, I bought a fantastic book of Poetry Patterns from the Scholastic Book Club that I have used ever since to teach poetry.  It has so many different types of poem in it.  I have blogged about some other poetry structures I have used from this book before including Sneaky Poetry and Walking Poetry.

Each week my class and I have a poem of the week.  So the other week our poem was Becky's Bio Poem from the Poetry Pattern book.

Each night the students take their Poetry Book home as part of their home reading and each day we look at a different aspect of the poem.  I have the poem up on the ActivBoard and they have their books.  The children use their copy in their books to complete the activities and I mirror it up on the ActivBoard and at times the children come up and use the ActivBoard too.

 

The first day we focused on the vocabulary that the children are not familiar with.  This is an opportunity for them to practice their dictionary search skills with a partner.  Our dictionaries are extremely well used in my class.  They are using their knowledge about alphabetical order, their skills in using guide words to help them locate a word, and then reading the definitions of the words they are searching for.



 

 

The next day we were looking for verbs.

 

 

The next day we looked at the lay out of the poem and some of the punctuation.  This was really about the choices the poet was making as they wrote.

 

And on this day I asked the children to identify all the words ending in 'y'.  This lead to a discussion on suffixes and prefixes.

 

During this week we also began writing our own version of the poem.  I also used the ActivBoard to demonstrate this.

 

 

After students had finished writing, they typed their poems up in an A3 Publisher document and printed out plain black and white copies.

 

In the meantime the children did some touching up of their backgrounds, adding paint to cover the white gaps and sharpening the edges with pastels.

 

The next step was for the students to take photos of each other.  I demonstrated using the camera as it is still a fairly new tool in our school, asking the children to take five photos of the person they were photographing, the first one being a photo looking upwards.  I then downloaded the photos and printed them out in black and white.  My first attempt the children and I decided that the photos had come out too small, so I printed them again.

 

We cut out the pictures and the sentences of the poems and glued them on.

 

 





These children are pretty stoked with the outcome and I love how much colour these posters are going to bring to my class.  I can barely wait for the parents to see them!!

Designing a new New Zealand flag

John Key, our Prime Minister, has been pushing the idea of a new flag since he came into government, and has ramped the debate up this year.

My class and I were studying Waitangi Day, and I thought the idea of designing a new national flag fitted in well with learning about our national day. 

The brief was to think of things that were "New Zealand" or "kiwi" and to make it simple enough for other school children to be able to draw the flag by hand.

So these flags are the children's ideas in my class:

Blogging Meme #2

This is my second blogging meme I was tagged in and I'm finally getting around to doing it.

My turn – I’ve been tagged into this blogging meme by A Keen Reader (@AKeenReader  – blog post here), and there is a Google+ page where it is all linked so click here to get to it, and so here I go…

The blogging task includes:

• Acknowledge the nominating blogger.
• Share 11 random facts about yourself.
• Answer the 11 questions the nominating blogger has created for you.
• List 11 bloggers.
• Post 11 questions for the bloggers you nominate to answer, and let all the bloggers know they have been nominated. Don’t nominate a blogger who has nominated you.

11 Random Facts:

1. I love reading books by Wilbur Smith and by Danielle Steel - polar opposites as far as genre go... but I like it like that.
2. I am an underwater waterskier - that means I rarely get on top of the water when skiing... I'm dragged behind the boat, under the water.
3. I do not have a head for heights.  Despite being on top of the abseiling tower at Totara Springs more times than I can count, I have not and will not ever abseil.
4. When I eat a Mellow Puff, or similar biscuit or chocolate bar, I eat all the chocolate off first before eating anything else.
5. I am that annoying person at the movies saying "As if!" and "Actually, he should be dead by now!"
6. I am a tail gating, impatient, road raging driver.... but if someone is up my butt, get lost buddy!!
7. My favourite movies are:  Bill and Ted's Most Excellent Adventure, The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins, Grease, Shawshank Dedemption, Under the Tuscan Sun and all Jason Bourne movies.
8. I have watched the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice starring Colin Firth more times than I can count.
9. I Google the plot of every movie as I am watching it so I have few surprises and can spot the differences between the movie and the Wikipedia description.
10. I am obsessed with quiz nights and will hog the mike at karaoke.
11. I was bitten my an Alsatian as a child and I still don't like them.  They are beautiful dogs, but I don't like them.

11 Questions A Keen Reader asked me to conquer:

1. Who has been a colleague (past or present) that you have regarded as a mentor?  Bob Marlow, the third principal I had, who saw I had a passion to teach, and that despite when I have been at my dumbest, has still had faith in me and who still gives me great advice more than eight years after I fled the nest.
2. What is your favourite NZ native bird, and why?  The mohua (yellowhead).  I've never seen one in real life, because they live in the lower South Island, but they are really endangered and seem like really amazing birds from what I've read about them (and there's not a lot on the net about them).  In 2010 I was doing my NZ endangered bird unit with a class, and one of the kids and I emailed someone who knows about mohua.  He sent us a letter and a $100 note (which the mohua is on) to buy some bird books for the class!  How cool is that?
3. What was your favourite book as a child?  Dog House For Sale - I got it from the Lucky Book Club.  I read it so much.  Now I take it to class with me and my classes love it too.
4. Worst job ever!  What was it?  It wasn't the whole job, just part of it.  At University I worked part-time as a day care centre reliever.  The job wasn't that bad except changing poohy nappies and undies and supervising the sleep room, which made me sleepy.  I also worked as a market researcher for a radio company... dead boring.... three cups of coffee every night... I was a mess!!
5. What’s the icebreaker question or activity you use to get to know someone?  I play that game in the class with the kids in a circle and you have to say your favourite food or the like, and as you go around each child repeats all the one's before them and then adds their own.  Of course you can do it with lots of topics.
6. Best person to follow on Twitter for one of your passions?  @boonman - he is funny and insightful.
7. What is your least favourite household chore?  I hate housework full stop - but I'm really not into cleaning the shower.
8. What’s one lesson/activity/unit that you really look forward to teaching?  I love teaching my NZ endangered bird unit.  It's science, social studies, English, art, music......
9. Fly first class to your overseas destination and have a little less spending money, or fly ‘cattle class’ and have a little more in your pocket?  Probably 'cattle class' so I can have more money to play with. 
10. What’s a web tool or app that you’ve come across recently that you’d heartily recommend to others?  Pinterest - I've actually been signed up since November 2012 at Educamp The Tron... but it has only really been in the last few months that I have really gotten into it.  I'm pinning stuff left, right and centre now!!
11. If you hosted a dress-up party, what theme would you choose, and why?   Rockstar/Popstar because then the karaoke would be even more fun.  I did tell you I hog the mike aye.

And now I shall choose 11 really lucky blogsters:
@NStevenson  @mrkempnz  @LinaLepou  @missmatich                        @HeatherGreaves3  @Tim_de_Vries    @nzleeangela   @Kar3nlj   @TeachingJuniors    @SimonAshby2   @nommopilot        

And here are your questions:

1. The movie that will always bring a tear to your eye is... and why"
2. The advert you hate most on tv is.... and why you hate it?
3. You have the opportunity to make what ever dishes you could possibly want to for a special dinner party.  What dishes would you make?
4. Who are the three people at this dinner party apart from you, and why?
5. The musician/band/group who you would most like to come to a venue near you and why you want to see them?
6. Which side of the bed do you sleep on?
7. Your most memorable family pet was..... because....?
8. Someone makes you breakfast in bed.  What would you most like it to be?
9. The worst present you ever received was....?
10. Which place in the world that you have never been to would you most like to go to?
11. The best beach in New Zealand is....?

Thanks for playing.  I hope I have not done any double ups!!

Blogging Meme #1

Thanks Sonya (@vanschaijik) for starting this, Vanessa (@VanessaJC83 check out http://viewsandreflections.blogspot.co.nz/2014/01/blogging-meme.html) for tagging me and Helen (@HelenofTroy01) for starting a Google Doc to track all these enlightening Memes (is that a word?).
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rjscDE0NSPnt1IcZMvthqcjBByAcKKU2hKjgQmqtHbU/edit#
 So this is mine!!
The blogging task includes:

• Acknowledge the nominating blogger.
• Share 11 random facts about yourself.
• Answer the 11 questions the nominating blogger has created for you.
• List 11 bloggers.
• Post 11 questions for the bloggers you nominate to answer, and let all the bloggers know they have been nominated.  Don't nominate a blogger who has nominated you.

11 Random Facts about Me:

1. I have an obsession about all the pins being the same colour when I pin a piece of work to the wall.
2. I won't eat a banana whole - it has to be mashed on toast or be in a banana cake.
3. I bought my Def Leppard cassette Hysteria the same day I bought Bros.  Def Leppard are still cool.  No one remembers Bros.
4. I have a very large collection of Cleo magazines.
5. I have moved eight times since April 2002, and my cat Murray has moved eleven times (he had extra moves to his 'grandparents' due to my work commitments).
6. I have two cats:  Murray McFlurray and Ritchie McClaw.  Murray is named after Murray Mexted and the McFlurry dessert at McDonalds; Ritchie is named after Richie McCaw with a play on claws (thanks to my class and teacher aide).
7. I named Ritchie McClaw's brother Dan Catter.  He lives in my parent's shed.
8. I have Ngapuhi (Ngati Manu) ancestry, as well as Prussian/Polish, Swiss, English, Irish, French and Australian convict ancestry - a bit of mongrel.
9. I love going to Whitianga - my family has been going there since the 1950s (when my Dad was a wee lad).
10. I have a Bachelor of Education, Diploma of Teaching, and Graduate Diploma of Information Technology in Education (GDITE) and this is my 19th year as a teacher.
11. I lost weight on my OE in England because I gave up drinking beer before I left NZ because it made me get too many pimples!!

My eleven questions from @VanessaJC83:

1. If you could live anywhere else in the world, where would it be and why?  Possibly Canada.  I really liked the ice hockey game I went to and thought if I couldn't live in NZ and watch great rugby, ice hockey would be cool.  And Canadians are lovely people.
2. What is your favourite holiday destination in New Zealand?  Mercury Bay, Whitianga in particular.  It's my turangawaewae.  When I was overseas, I carried a picture of the view from my beach, Wharekaho, wherever I went.
3. As a child what did you want to be when you grew up?  Wonder Woman.
4. What did you wonder about today?  How nice it was at the beach and if the waves were any good.
5. What did you learn today?  Actually, nothing.  Today is the first day in ages I haven't obsessively googled something to find out about it!  Very unusual for me!!
6. Facebook or Google+ and why?  Facebook - all my friends are on it.  I have no idea if any of my friends even know about Google+ so I don't share anything from it.
7. What do you love and/or hate most about technology?  I love the endless possibilities and the evolution of it.  When I saw my first computer it was amazing, but very limited.  We never foresaw what we have today.  What I hate about it: there's so much to try and do.... I don't have enough time to check it all out, and I've become obsessed with checking my Twitter and Facebook updates and checking what is the latest news... and the matching game in my Talking Cat app.
8. How do you like to relax after a long, hard day at work?  It's cool to catch up with friends over a drink and nibbles..... or die quietly in front of the tv with my laptop and cell phone on hand.
9. What was your highlight of 2013?  Still having my Gran at the end of the year.  She's given us a few frights, and after her brother died in October we've worried about her even more.
10. What is your favourite TV programme or movie and why?  Shortland Street - I can hear your howls.... but it is quintessentially Kiwi and I missed it so much on my OE.  Every NZ actor has been on it or will be on it at some point and for better or worse it reflects NZ society.
11. Please share your favourite children's book and why. Ohhh, this is hard because there are so many good ones.... probably Kiss Kiss Yuck Yuck.  It is a kiwi kids book, about a little boy called Andy whose Aunty Elsie visits every weekend and he hides from her but she always finds him and gives him big kisses and a new endearing nickname.  I like it because my brother is called Andrew and our Aunty Ellen and Aunty Gail always held him down to get their kisses.  I gave it to him for his birthday well before he had kids, and now he reads it too his kids and we trained my nephew Taylor to say Yuck Yuck when Aunty Ellen gives him kisses!!

My lucky chosen eleven bloggers:
@NZAnts  @fuse711 @JaniceWW  @BeLchick1   @simone015  @mrsmoorenz                        @fivefoot3     @MissesArtech           @AKeenReader     @kgilligan           @Novalightning


My questions for my bloggers:

1. What is your favourite movie of all time?
2. Who was your favourite teacher as a child and why?
3. If you could combine any two animals in the world, which ones would you combine and why?
4. If you won Lotto Powerball, what would be the first thing you would do after the money went into your bank account?
5. You're Prime Minister for the day - what one thing would you do?
6. Which food/meal from your childhood haunts you still today?
7. In all your travels, in New Zealand or overseas, your favourite place and why was....?
8. Which song or artist always puts you in your happy place?
9. If your house was on fire, what three items would you save if that was all you could take?
10. As an educationalist, what was one of your most satisfying moments?
11. What do you look for in a leader at your school/education facility?

Thanks for reading and sharing and participating.  I know it's taken me a while to get this done Vanessa, but better late than never!!

And maybe you can adapt this idea for your class at the beginning of the year!
 

Ken Shelton - Keynote One at ULearn13 - Inspire and Motivate Through Transformational Teaching and Learning

I've attended the last two ULearn conferences in Rotorua (2011) and Auckland (2012), so it was exciting to have ULearn in my own backyard of Hamilton and getting to sleep in my own bed still.

First up, as the opening Keynote speaker, was Ken Shelton, an Apple Distinguished Educator, a Google Certified Teacher and a Discovery STAR Educator.  Click here to go to the profile put up by Core Education to introduce Ken.

And this is what I got from Ken's speech (click here to watch for yourself):

Inspire and Motivate Through Transformational Teaching and Learning

• How have we changed our learning?  When we or our kids want to learn something now, we go to You Tube - this is where we learn and get entertainment.  We have changed our physical spaces we learn in.  We learn from the web.  Technology has transformed, and our accessibility to learning with technology has changed, evolved.
• Learning needs to be fun - Ken showed a video of how people tried to get people to use the stairs more than an escalator at a subway station by turning the stairs into a piano.  Click here to watch.  How do we transform, modify, something for our students and colleagues?
• Why would we as educators want to do any form of transformation in our teaching, in education, in our physical space?
• Sometimes change is just changing one simple thing to get a massive change.
• Engagement is a reason for change.
• Ken Shelton gave a shout out to #kidsedchatnz on Twitter where children engage in conversations on Twitter about their learning.
• When we do any type of transformation we stand a greater chance of increasing the engagement of our students in their learning.
• Technology can be used as inspiration.  Ken uses videos to often inspire, Go Pro videos, to encourage students to express themselves within each discipline of study, e.g. investigating physics through skateboarding.
• Technology is not the be all and end all - it is a mechanism for transformation.
• Ken showed a video, Zack Matere Growing Knowledge, where Zack explains how he used the internet to solve the problem of diseased potatoes, helped a friend to build a windmill, and to provide information for a notice board to give information to people in his village.  Zack used the internet as a mechanism for transformation.
• Creativity is essential in learning, and Ken spoke about how Sir Ken Robinson is one of the biggest proponents of creativity in learning.
• Transformation is a key to creativity and vice versa.
• Children need opportunities to write and/or create content.  Creating content is more than writing a story.... it can be creating a video.
• Children need to publish.
• Give students opportunities to decide how to use their content and how their content knowledge will be assessed - publishing online helps students to be self-critical and self-evaluate their own writing.
• Technology is no more dangerous now than bicycles were in the 1800s. It's about preparing the environment.
• It's not simply the inclusion of Technology such as word processing in learning - it is the amplification of the use of Technology such as the use of blogging.
• What will I attend that will transform my learning and teaching?
• Destination unknown - when we embark on change we do not necessarily know where we will end up.  The look on the children's' faces when they 'change' is worth the risk.
• Kids work needs to be seen - it doesn't have the same impact if other people don't see it. We have to help create the audience for our kids.
• This video is of an explorer of the modern kind.  Andrew Vanden Heuvel used Google Glass to take a class in the US on a physics field trip to Cern, Switzerland, where they/he could directly ask the scientists and engineers there about this massive machine investigating how our world came into being.  How inspiring is that?  (And I'm guessing Google Glass will be in our classrooms of the future...)
• Creating authentic opportunities for connection part of the deal and often overlooked by teachers.
• "Everyone can publish and everyone will." - Vice President of Google.
• Ken told us here about Inspiration and Creativity: Next Vista for Learning where people  submit a short quality videos that explains something and is copyright free (including music) for several competitions throughout the year.
• You have to have the content knowledge to produce a video.
• Have to know the process of how to make a video
• Have to know and understand copyright, free use, etc.
• Ken used this video as an example of what can be found on the Next Vista site and as an expectation for entries to their competitions.  Ken uses these videos to inspire his own students to create and do better.
• Publishing process just as important as the publishing itself.

• Just inclusion:  "I let the children use technology and type their stories up in Word/Publisher/Google Docs".
• Amplification:  publishing on a blog or creating and posting a video - ramping it up.
• Transformation:  what's going on in your classroom, how the kids are learning, how we are learning, what we are doing, how are we collaborating, how are we connecting?
• Ken used wordsift.com to create a 'picture' of the words that we fed back to Ken through his back channel as he spoke.

• Find workshops that will help you change and transform something in your teaching.
• Are you risk assertive or risk divertive? The greater the risk the greater the reward.
• Technology is about enabling collaboration and creativity.
• Publish for transformation more than inclusion or engagement.
• It's amplification that leads to the transformation.
• Would you like kids to learn from Wikipedia or a primary source? Ken couldn't take kids to Juno Alaska to meet the elders and hear the stories, but he could arrange to Skype people from there. 
• We, the teachers, need to be published too - both teachers and students.

A day after posting....

So I have been reflecting on this post today.... It felt like I hadn't really given it a conclusion.  So, like a good writer does, I've come back to revisit this post and add on the conclusion I feel I need to give it.

So what did I take home from listening to Ken Shelton speak?

• Change doesn't have to be big.  A small change can have a significant impact on how and what we learn.  Don't be afraid to make a small change to amp things up, to get some form of transformation.
• Have fun when learning and make learning fun.
• Use technology to inspire and as a tool to create.

Yesterday I made a mum cry with joy.

Yesterday I made a mum cry with joy.

 

That's much better than making them cry because they've suddenly found out their beloved child isn't where they thought he was in his learning - which was a situation she and I had earlier in the year.

 

But what these two incidents confirm for me is how important communication and honesty between the teacher and parents are.

 

Earlier in the year I was telling this parent that her child was below where she had been told he was last year and that I had great concerns for his learning.  I had to take him backwards to move him forwards.

 

All year I've looked at this child with great concern, face palmed when he just "didn't get" some fairly simple concepts or instructions, growled when he didn't get on with it, redirected him when he was lost, chunked it down, set smaller goals to achieve, showed him a few tricks, explicitly taught him how to do something... yep... the full spectrum!

 

But lately it seems a little spark has ignited in this young chap. The boy who sat there saying nothing now occasionally pops out a one liner that makes you stop and stare, has the answer to a question and isn't too timid to say it.  The boy who struggled to put pen to paper writes half a page.  The boy who didn't want to read at the beginning of the year now tells his mum he likes it better than maths and is excited to come to reading.  Now I've got to reignite his maths joy!!

 

Last week we had parent/teacher learning conversations (conferences).  I showed his mum the testing I'd done the week before on basic facts stages.  His mum fed back to me about his basic facts homework and we made the decision together to give her boy the homework for the level he has yet to achieve plus the homework for the next level to motivate him.  When we spoke yesterday she told me he was loving it and I had seen during our marking session that day that he was onto it with the next level.  But our big goal for both levels is to get him working at speed.

 

I have to say some of the other children in the class were a bit envious that this one child was getting to do two levels of maths for homework.

 

So let's fast forward to this week.  I've been testing the kids on their essential spelling lists (thanks NZCER) for the fourth time this year. At the beginning of the year this boy was struggling to get through lists three and four.  Last term we attempted list five for the first time.  He blew that list out of the water this week, so I tried him out on list six and was pleasantly surprised.  So I said to him, "Mate, I'm so proud of what you've done in your spelling.  I want you to try list seven.  I don't care what score you get, I just want to see what you're doing with the words at this level."  He agreed that was a good idea and he did it.  If I'd tried that in February I would have fried his brain, but now he is ready for it because his confidence has grown so much!!

 

I have to say that despite his score for list seven being low I was greatly encouraged as he was so close on so many words.  Like I said, things are starting to click for this boy.  He's that little bit older and that little bit more mature and it's starting to come together for him.

 

But I could never have done this by myself.

 

I've had support from a teacher aide in my classroom who casts that extra set of eyes over all the children (not just the one she's employed to work with) and alerts me to what I'm too busy to see at times.

 

I've had a really positive RTLB who works with two other children in my class who I bounce ideas off about the other children I worry about.  That has been great to have as well.

 

But the most important relationship that I have developed to help this boy, apart from my relationship with him of course, is with his mum.  It was starting honest communication, keeping up those casual interactions at the school gate with little updates and the odd email home as well as the more formal things like the conferences and the Achievement Books that I sent home a few weeks ago.  Through these interactions I learn more about the child and what he thinks and needs from me, and this goes hand in hand with what I see him do in class, in my teaching groups and in his work and assessments.

 

Teaching is all about relationships.  Relationships between the kids and relationships between the kids and the teacher; relationships with the parents; relationships with colleagues.  These relationships help me to be a better teacher to help the children I teach, because I really can't do the best for them by myself. 

 

So yesterday was a warm fuzzies moment I'll treasure as much as his mum does.

World Teachers' Day - Why I am a teacher.

Today is World Teachers' Day.  Normally I used this blog as my reflection of what I do in the classroom.  But today I would like to reflect on teaching as a profession and why I choose to be a teacher and continue to choose to be a teacher despite the GERM infecting our quality public education system.

The launch of World Teachers' Day in Gisborne 5th October 2013.

The launch of a year of promoting teaching as a profession and quality public education (that hasn't been affected by GERM) happened this morning on the beach in Gisborne, on the east coast of the North Island in New Zealand, with launches to happen, as October 5th dawns around the world, in Paris and New York as well.

A teacher friend yesterday posted on Facebook to have a Happy Teachers' Day (Hallmark: cue new card/money making opportunity) and try not to mark anything.

That got me thinking, because between two conferences and car maintenance and a planning day with my fellow staff members, I don't have many opportunities to either relax and recharge or get organised in my class during this term break for the upcoming term four.  So instead of marking or photocopying or whatever, I am choosing to blog about why I am a teacher.

I decided to become a teacher when I was about 15 or 16.  Before that, in my very formative years, I had ideas of being Wonder Woman, a doctor or a fireman (gender issues weren't high in my thoughts then), or even the fifth member of ABBA!!!  Later on as I left primary school and was making my subject choices for high school, being a lawyer was my goal.  Thankfully I changed my mind from that, decided that being a teacher was a much better option, and here follows the list of why:

• I like children.  They are usually a lot of fun to hang out with.  They are funny and get pleasure out of the most unexpected things.
• I never wanted to fully grow up.  I reckon the best teachers are the ones that still have something childlike about them.  We don't all have the same childlike 'thing' as each other, because we are all individuals after all, and if we all have different childlike qualities it gives each teacher that 'thing' that will connect with the individual children we teach who need that 'thing'.
• I love learning.  Teachers don't know everything - yet.  Sometimes we decide to teach a unit we know stuff all about, so it sends us off on our own learning, doing research.  Sometimes we learn beside the children, discover new things as they are discovering.  Even with units that I have done for years, like my Anzac Day unit, I learn something new each and every year.
• I love being creative.  It's more that doing things like art or music or dance or drama.  You can be creative with how you display things in the class.  You can be creative with the activities the children do before, during and after their reading.  You can be creative with ICT.  You can even be creative in mathematics!!  Listening to Prof Yong Zhao this week reinforced my belief that teachers are creative people.
• I love seeing the children get that "a-ha" moment and to celebrate their progress.  For most children they make good, steady progress and that gives me a great sense of achievement.  For some others a switch is flicked because things finally click.  Love it.
• I love introducing ICT into the classroom and seeing how the children take it on board as a learning tool and a way to create new things.
  
• I love seeing how the children grow and develop and change.  I'm lucky enough to still be in contact with some previous students or to bump into them when I am out and about and I am in awe of what they have done.  Some have gone to the USA on scholarships for tennis, golf and volleyball.  One has become a radio DJ (apt, as he talked an awful lot).  Some have followed their parents into farming.  Some have become parents.  Some are at university or tech.  Some have represented their province in a variety of sports or joined the National Secondary School Band.  If they have made it through to adulthood in one piece I am extremely proud of them, whatever they have done or where ever they are - once a kid in my class, always one of my kids.
• I love meeting with other teachers and sharing about what amazing things our children have done, said, learned or created; talking about the challenging children and sharing ideas on how to help them; sharing about the great learning we have, are or are about to do.  Then there is are also the professional, theoretical and industrial discussions we have as well.

So on World Teachers' Day, I want you as a teacher to reflect on why you are a teacher; and if you aren't a teacher, please reflect on your favourite teachers and why they were your favourite teachers.

You know, when I come to think about it, some days being a teacher is like being like Wonder Woman.