Let's Frame 'Em

I mentioned in my last post that I collected content for our end of year gifts by asking the children to make three positive comments about all the other people in the room. I love this project. The kids love this project. Their parents love this project. It's a winner. Take a look...

And it's so simple.

1. Collect as many positive comments about each child/teacher as possible. I've done this a couple of ways: by giving each child an A3 sheet printed with the class list with room for to write their comments next to the names; interviewing each child individually whilst sitting in front of my computer and typing their comments directly into a spreadsheet. It really depends on the age and ability of the group.
2. Collate all of the comments about each person into one digital file. Add the person's name.
3. Use one of the web 2.0 tools such as wordle.net to create a word cloud.
4. Print.
5. Frame.

The little hints that I have to share about each stage: 

1. First up let me tell you that this is the hardest part of the whole task:
1. Some kids just don't invite positive comments from their peers. You know the ones I mean: little Johnny who is still learning about social skills and personal hygiene. (Note: I'm not suggesting that little Johnny can't be described positively but that his peers aren't necessarily the ones who are going to do it.)
2. Getting appropriate comments without spilling the secret is, in the case of some children, impossible.  Again, you know the ones I  mean: the ones who think 'you're phat as!' is a compliment.
3. Getting comments that are one or two words long can be tricky. I encouraged the use of adjectives or two word noun groups.
4. In a class of 31 students and 2 teachers that's 32 lots of 3 comments. That's actually a lot of work for some kids; especially if you ban words like nice, cool and epic. (Which ,of course, I did.)
2. Can be time consuming and mind numbingly boring. (Also very funny. I had to laugh at 'he is learning not to hit me in the face so much and nearly always apologises now'.) Be mindful that if you are using wordle.net that the more frequently a word appears in the list the bigger it will be in the word cloud. If you want the person's name to stand out you need to add it however many times to make it appear most frequently.  Also... I used this stage to add any characteristics that I wanted to encourage.
3. There are a few around. I like wordle.net for its simplicity. It's a bit clunky and I get frustrated with having to reset the 'custom palette' BUT it does exactly what I want it to do, for free, pretty easily.
4. With wordle.net you can't save directly to a file (unless printing to a pdf in the print dialogue box) so I use a snipping tool to then save as a jpg. I then inserted the jpgs into a publisher document to get the exact size I wanted for the frames I'd bought. Have a play to find what works best for you.
5. I bought small inexpensive frames for the kids from Ikea. I glued a little slip on the back saying that these words were how their classmates and teachers had described them in 2013 and that we hoped it reminded them of the awesome time we spent together. 

Easy, a little time consuming but SO well worth the effort. I wish I could share the photos I took after I handed them out because the reactions were beautiful.  They have a longer effect too. A few weeks ago I ran into the mother of one of my students from last year who told me that it's still on her daughter's wall (a year later!) and that her daughter will often take it down to look at when she's feeling stressed about life. Gotta tell you: hearing that made my day. 

Should you ever decide to give it a go and run into trouble please get in contact and I'll see what I can do to help!

Christmas at School...

I've been a teacher for two Christmas periods. The two experiences could not have been more different.

The first year I had taken over a year 3/4 class, after their regular teacher took maternity leave, in a school with huge cultural, religious and economic diversity. (Christianity was definitely a minority faith.) Christmas wasn't really a big part of our programme; we focussed on celebrating the end of the school year, the coming of summer and our progress & successes. I had the delightful experience of having one child (of Islamic heritage) ask me "what is Christmas all about anyway?" (I didn't need to answer as two of his classmates (one who attends a Latter Day Saints temple and the other a devout non-denominational Christian) explained it beautifully in a way I never could.)

This year I had the honour of working with two classes in the run  up to Christmas: the year 3/4 class I co-taught two days a week and the primary special class I took over for three days a week for the last 5 weeks of the year. This school culture allowed and encouraged the celebration of Christmas.  So... We used the celebration of Christmas to direct some of our learning.

Primary Special Class
The other teacher in this class and I ran similar but separate programmes. She arranged a neat little booklet of Christmas puzzles, mazes etc. for the class to work on as they had time and interest. I encouraged them to continue working on this if they finished some of our work early. I think a couple of them felt a little frustrated by this because it meant they NEVER had any 'nothing to do' time. Gotcha! The last three weeks of term we had a Christmas Extravaganza, following on from two weeks of talking about celebrations in general. I'm still amazed at the sheer amount we crammed into our time together. Here's some of it.

• Using a Christmas lights template we created posters that highlighted the ways we each 'light up' our school. (E.g. I'm a good friend and support people when they're feeling sad. I'm like to include people in my games in the yard.) This particular cohort found the self-reflection needed for this REALLY hard, so we sat as a group and showered each child with positive reflections. They then chose their favourites and we helped them write the sentences.  We decorated the lights with glitter! I'm not sure which was brighter - the glitter or their faces during the brainstorm?
• We used our measurement and ordering skills to make beautiful Christmas trees. I didn't take any photos of them which quite saddening because they were gorgeous. General gist is that I provided each child with 12 slips of precut paper. They had to order them longest to shortest and then lay them out like a Christmas tree. It was quite a challenging task for a few of our class so we were very proud of their finished products. Here's the image that inspired this project anyway: 

This is from Mrs Lee's Kindergarten blog.
She has some great ideas, go check her out.

• We made gingerbread cookies. I found an amazingly simple recipe that works really well for school settings because there's no waiting around for bicarb to do its thing or anything overly complicated. (It works even better when the oven door closes which ours didn't do to start with, but that's a whole other story that doesn't warrant telling because I'm the idiot who didn't see the tray in the way.) Anyway,  the recipe we used is here. (I altered it a little by swapping golden syrup in for the honey because I'm not madly keen on honey.)
• We made cinnamon Christmas tree decorations. Oh my goodness, I loved cooking type activities with this class. The opportunities for multi-sensorial learning just abounded. LOVED IT! The recipe I used can be found here.  Each child took home a little bag of about 15-20 hand cut decorations. I had to be VERY clear that these were NOT for eating... They looked just like the gingerbread we made. 

Some of the decorations after baking.

• We played Christmas maths games, did Christmas riddles, sang until we were hoarse, and wrote pages and pages about our Christmas memories, wishes, and plans. 
• We made a range of cards for different people and in different styles: some by hand in whatever style each child chose; some by hand with specific instructions; and some on the computer using shapes to create silhouette images.
• We sewed finger puppet and put together bon bons. (Never again... They were too hard, and too fiddly. Not even I enjoyed that one.)
• We learned how to play Jingle Bells on chair drums. I was so proud of the class for this one, and it was somewhat of a process so I'll blog about it separately. 

Year 3/4
My co-teacher and I had planned our programme to continue most of our teaching and learning programme pretty well until the end of term so Christmas didn't take over this classroom quite as much. I also wanted to focus a little more on celebrating the kids' personal progress and successes than an event that for many of the children means little more than presents and good food. Here's a quick overview of some of our activities.

• We made posters with painted finger print Christmas lights along the top underneath which each children wrote a positive memories on every other poster. (That was tough work!)

  

  Interesting way to get my name in lights... :)

• Along similar lines I asked each child to provide me with three positive adjectives or comments about every other person in the class (children and teachers).  At the time they assumed that we were focussing on finding the positive in others and developing our descriptive writing. Ha! I was actually collecting the content for the end of year gifts I made for them. I'll tell you about those in a later post.
• We followed up our unit of work on  procedural texts with a session on critiquing procedural texts for creating origami Christmas trees. 
• We did a couple of gridding activities with Christmas shapes.
• We made Christmas trees that highlighted warm and cool colours.

  

  A couple of the kids' completed work.

• We made cards for our families.
• We had two massive Christmas soft toys (a Santa head and a reindeer head) that went home (with journals) with different children each night.
• We made coasters for our families. (I LOVED the coaster project so stay tuned for a whole post about those.) Here's a sneak peak though...

Nearly finished...

So... Just a bit different to last year! Both years have been amazing though; I love my job.

Holiday Howdy.

So here we are, four weeks into the summer holidays and I'm only just now sitting down to get moving towards the blogging goals I set myself for my summer break. Time to step up Mrs R-P!

I was pretty well out of action the first three weeks of the holidays due to some eye surgery that has had a ridiculously slightly longer recovery than we were expecting. I'm still quite unsteady on my feet and am walking into the odd wall but that's not overly unusual for me... I'm not the most graceful gazelle in the herd.  I've struggled with the enforced 'quiet' time, but have used it to catch up a few podcasts and TED talks.

Here's a sampling of my playlist over the last few weeks.

Sir Ken's TED pic.

Sir Ken Robinson: I will stop whatever I'm doing pretty much anytime to listen to this man. He is funny, insightful and BRILLIANT.
His TED talk 'How Schools Kill Creativity' is wonderful (and can be watched here); and his Google 2012 Zeitgeist talk 'The World We Explore' stayed with me for days (and can be watched here).
For a bit of a change in pace, here is an RSA Animate adapted from a talk Sir Ken gave about the changing paradigm of education. (This one is good to watch rather than just listen... Although having already seen it, I enjoyed listening to it again.)

Rita in full flight during her TED talk.

Rita Pierson: Oh my goodness. In this TED talk she says: " Every child deserves a champion - an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection, and insists that they become the best that they can possibly be". I have this written in my school diary and look at it every day.
There are piles of Rita's funny stories around also... My husband had a good chuckle at this one.

www.kidpresident.com

Kid President: Yeah, OK, not the most intellectually stimulating stuff of all time but the concept is fantastic and the kid is awesome. Kudos to the family that created such loving and strong relationships that this is the outcome. Check out his photo here - how can you not love him?

www.stuffyoushouldknow.com

Josh Clark & Chuck Bryant: Oh you don't know them? Bwa ha ha. Josh & Chuck are the presenters of one of my favourite podcasts of all time: Stuff You Should Know. The basic idea is that Josh & Chuck (and I presume a team of researchers) unpack and delve into a range of weird and interesting topics and present a twice weekly podcast. So, for example, you might choose to listen to 'How the Rosetta Stone Works' (here) or maybe 'How Braille Works' (here) or just for something completely out of left field 'What's the Most Expensive Toilet in the World?' (here). (I've only listened to the first two of those three, but believe that the short answer to the third  is that it's made of solid gold and can be found in Hong Kong.)  I've played a few of these to my 12 & 14 year old sons and they love them. I'm pretty sure that some of them would make great classroom listening too.

CC by 2.0 Michael Janssen

Music: pretty much anything my husband chooses. He's the music man in our family so for the most part I defer to his judgement. And he's pretty good at picking the mood of an audience.  Otherwise, if he's not around, I'm loving rdio.com. Check it out, it's good.






Just a sneak into my summer break so far. Now that I can cope with more than a few minutes in front of a screen I've big plans for blogging this coming week. Stay tuned. In the meantime... How are your holidays? Or alternatively for my North American friends: I hope you're coping with the fall out from the polar vortex. Stay warm if at all possible. :)

End of the Year Blues

I hate the end of the school year. Loathe it. Absolutely detest it. Not so much as a parent, but as a teacher it just sucks the life out of me.  I'm tired, I'm emotional, I'm done. And yet, as much as I desperately need the luxury of learning to sleep past 5:45am I don't want the year to end. I am not looking forward to the bell ringing at 2:30 on Friday. I dread that moment. In fact, I'm pretty sure I had a nightmare about it last night.

I know I'm not alone in this feeling, although you'd never think that if you listened to early morning staffroom conversations. I'm not sure why other people don't like the end of the year but here are my reasons:

• I love my job. I love the challenges, the opportunities, the variety. I often feel like I'm cheating somehow: how is it right that I get paid to have this much fun? Holidays are great'n'all but, for me, my job is just as enjoyable as most holiday time. (Which may say more about my holiday plans than anything else?!?!)
• I love my kids. Sure, there are times they drive me to distraction, but on the whole they are amazing. Both of my classes are astoundingly wonderful. I'm blessed with two groups of kids to love. I will miss them all terribly. I know this, because I still miss last years' kids terribly.
• I'm not a fan of packing up. This isn't to say that I'm a messy person, just that I MUCH prefer being creative and setting up awesome learning spaces than pulling them apart. Empty classrooms at the end of the school year look tired and forlorn. Interesting isn't it that the exact same space with the exact same furniture will look exciting and full of promise in a few weeks?

AFS offers programmes in more
than 80 countries around the world.

• I suck at goodbyes. I've known this for a while. When I was 17 I did a year long AFS student exchange to Honduras in Central America. The day I left my host family to return to Australia the airport security had to escort me through the departure gate because I was so distraught from the farewells. Some years later, in a volunteer role with the same organisation I was required to be at the airport as our international students returned home after their exchange here. I met most of these kids for the first time that day at the airport. I always cried before them, and usually long after they'd left because watching their goodbyes was so freaking difficult. I am not good at goodbyes. As a contract teacher I'm not sure what next year holds for me and so I will be leaving this school at the end of the school year not knowing if I'll be back next year. That's a bucket load of goodbyes. Argh!
• I'm not good at being still. Or doing nothing. Or relaxing. My husband really struggles with this. He can pull up a chair, pour himself a glass of wine and quietly watch the world around him. I, on the other hand, need to be doing something while we sit there: I'll chatter, I'll be researching something (on my smart phone), I'll be scribbling notes for some idea or other (usually also on my smart phone), I'll be playing sudoku (again, on my smart phone... I sense a theme here), I usually have a book in my bag ready to whip out at the slightest sign of prolonged sitting, I'll be people watching, I'll possibly be silently assessing the phonological development of some unwitting stranger, I'll always be moving. (Yes, I'm that person who has the radio and TV playing at the same time while I read.) So, y'all can imagine how I love holidays. The end of the school year means holidays. Lots of holidays.
• As I mentioned, I'm a contract teacher. Nothing else needs be said really.

So there we have it folks. I hate the end of the school year. 

Having said that, the holidays will give me the chance to catch up on writing all the blog ideas I've had lately. And sleep. And hang out with my OWN kids. And spend time with my husband. And finally sort out my office space. And catalogue my books. (Yep, I'm that kinda geek.) And see my teacher friends who are also too busy during term to do more than wave across cyberspace. And ride to the new coffee shop with my delightful neighbour. And crochet my awesome Very Hungry Caterpillar (my husband bought me a kit, and whilst I'm a complete noob at crocheting, I'm chaffing at the bit to give it a go). And well. I think I've made my point. I hate the end of the school year but I'll make it work for me. 

This post doesn't relate to the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers in any meaningful way because it's just a vent. Thanks for letting me getting it off my chest! 

Pumpkin Pie Adventure

We don't celebrate Thanksgiving here in Australia. It's not our celebration. We do however tend to jump on any ol' bandwagon that's passing and appears to have tasty food.As it turns out... Pumpkin pie is one tasty dish. One of my  spec. ed. students asked me about pumpkin pie sometime last week and being a bit busy at the time (and not really knowing the answer to his question anyway) I suggested he do some research. Long story short: the research turned into a proposal that resulted in me agreeing to cooking pumpkin pie with the class today.

Which I promptly forgot. (I teach this class Wednesday - Friday and so I didn't have the benefit of constant reminders earlier in the week.) Thank goodness that we're nearing Christmas and our Christian Pastoral Support Worker was baking spice cookies with another class yesterday which jolted me into remembering. Phew! 

The research my student did included a (very simple to follow) recipe which I modified a little to suit the fact that there just wasn't going to be enough time to make pastry as well as the filling and bake big pies. I originally thought to buy a couple of big unfilled pie shells but decided, in the end, to go with mini ones. What. A. Good. Move. For a whole bunch of reasons;  not the least of which was a MUCH reduced cooking time and no need to cut anything.

So I cooked up the pumpkin last night and gathered my spices. In this house we're big 'from scratch' food/cooking fans and so we have a nice collection of spices, both whole and ground. I packed everything I could possibly need to make a pumpkin pie. Except a mixing bowl. Or mixing spoon. Ooops. Lucky our canteen manager is an angel and was willing to lend them to me.

I started our session by talking about all the various things we needed. We handed around the whole and ground spices to compare the smell, look and feel. It was delightful to hear the associations many of the smells held for the children. We also talked a little about the various uses for the spices. The idea of 'shoving' a whole clove into an infected tooth made them all a little more friendlier toward their dentists I think!

Everyone had a turn of measuring, mixing, pouring etc. We're a small class (12 on the roll but usually only 8 or 9 students) which meant everyone was involved all the way through. Right up until the bell for recess went when I was left holding the baby filling the shells. Ha! 

The pies came back to our classroom to cool. Oh. My. Goodness. Not a clever idea. They smelt amazing. The temptation to 'check on them' was too great for a few of us so it was with sweet relief that lunchtime arrived and I invited the children to taste their handiwork.

Resounding success. Not only did they all love eating the pies, but they were so proud that they wanted to share the leftovers with the principal and their buddy class teachers. It was such a delight to see them scurry off to spread the love. 

As you would expect from me, I did manage to squeeze some literacy into the activity also. We co-constructed a procedural text on 'how to make pumpkin pie'. It made me realise how I long to teach a class  fulltime (and not at the end of the year) so that I can build whole units of work that incorporate activities like this. Ooooh... Integrating cooking, life skills and art with a procedural text unit in a spec. ed. class! Oooh! Ooops. Sorry. I digress. Only a couple of the children managed to get much down on paper but it was a valuable exercise in recall, recounting our process, and talking about the features of a procedural text. Tomorrow they'll write recounts of the activity, right through to the eating! I love helping each child at their point in ability and development to achieve writing success. Whether it's a scaffolded format with sentence starters, or a proforma that requires minimal writing (there's at least one child for whom the physical act of writing is a challenge at the moment) or even allowing them to speak their text... I LOVE seeing the sense of accomplishment on their faces.  Again, I digress. 

So there you have my pumpkin pie adventure. I realised last night, while at the store buying pumpkin, that Thanksgiving is this week in the US so it's all rather fortuitously timed. I have a load of the filling left and think I might make a big one for the family tomorrow. Happy Thanksgiving to all my US friends. (And a belated greeting to my Canadian friends for a few weeks ago.)

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 1.5 Differentiate teaching to meet the specific learning needs of students across the full range of abilities.

Standard 1.6 Strategies to support full participation of students with disability

Standard 2.5 Literacy and numeracy strategies
Standard 3.2 Plan, structure and sequence learning programmes
Standard 3.3 Use teaching strategies 

Standard 4.1 Support student participation
Standard 4.4 Maintain student safety 

"What can I do to make you feel better?"

Wasn't she beautiful?
'Penny'

So. About five minutes after I posted my last entry my children discovered that one of our precious furry family members was very injured. Without going into gruesome details we raced her to the vet but weren't able to bring her home. She had been hit by a car. Our family was, and continues to be, heartbroken.

The following Monday, at school, I chose to spend my recess inside with a student who needed a bit of a break from 'community'. He'd had a pretty rough time over the weekend and until that point had been almost non-verbal. As soon as everyone else had left he turned and eye balled me pretty fiercely.  "You look really sad Mrs R-P. Why?" Pretty insightful. (And a little disappointing because I'd been trying hard to not show my sadness because I didn't want to have to share the story.) I considered the options for my response: should I lie and say everything was fine, brushing off his concern and not reinforcing the positives in his noticing? Should I come up with a pat answer that would explain away my sadness but without the truth? Or should I tell the truth even though doing so would inevitably end in my tears?

In the end, I teared up whilst trying to decide and so didn't really have much of a choice. I told him what had happened,  leaving out the gruesome bits he asked for later.  And here's the part that broke my heart just as fast as it offered solace... This little guy who had, not five minutes earlier, been non-responsive and unable to engage with anyone put his hand on top of mine and gently whispered "What can I do to make you feel better?" Despite everything that's happened in this little guy's life, his little heart sat there on his face and he showed concern for someone else because their cat died. Oh. Yes. He broke my heart with that comment. And made me so very hopeful for his, and the world's, future.

How was this related to teaching? Well, you won't find me linking it to the AITSL standards because it's more than the standards. It's the heart part of teaching rather than the head; in fact it's what makes the head part possible. It's why I teach.

Classroom visitors

This was taken just a few minutes
after we realised that they'd hatched.

The clutch of eggs on which our duck was sitting recently hatched and our family of 8 people, 2 cats, 1 dog, 1 frog, 2 guinea pigs, 4 chickens, 2 ducks and more fish than, frankly, I care to count just became all of that and seven six ducklings. (One of the live hatchlings perished after a couple of days. Let's not talk about it. It was a bit distressing.) Imagine the excitement of our six children... (although to be completely honest, I think my husband was the most exuberant) and then imagine the excitement of the 31 children in my class. Yep, we took seven 2 day old ducklings into my classroom.

Shortly before they arrived I polled the students on their predictions for the duckling (and mother duck) weights. Well, that was just about the most eye opening formative assessment I've ever done. (All tied in rather fortitiously with the measurement unit I was starting that day!) I didn't expect them to be overly accurate but I did kinda think they'd be close-ish. These predictions weren't even on the same planet let alone the general vicinity. These predictions (let's be honest and call them what they really were) guesses ranged between 600 grams and 5 kilograms. Reality? The ducklings ranged between 39g and 42g, while the mother weighed 1.2kg. Ha!

After very careful instructions about how to hold the ducklings, every child had the opportunity to do so. It was just delightful to see the tough boys flinch at the wiggling feet before melting. The girls are, on the whole, a rather pragmatic bunch and took it all in their stride. A few children needed my support to hold the ducklings without crushing them because of motor control issues, so I'm super grateful that my husband stayed to help out.

One of our bunch, new to the cohort, tends towards to the more excitable end of the spectrum and his reaction to the ducklings will stay with me for a long time. He's a tough little man who confronts the world face (and often fists) first, with a strength that he neither recognises nor believes. Seeing the ducklings, his eyes light up like fireworks, and his whole body softened. He proceeded to bounce around the room in excitement but responded exceptionally well to the reminder that all babies are very delicate and the ducklings needed him to keep 'safe hands and safe feet'. (I don't think I've ever seen him sit down so quickly.) Immediately on being handed a duckling he kissed the beak and cradled it to his chest like it was the most precious little creature in the world. I'll admit that even now, just writing about it, I get a wee bit misty. (I'm prone to getting dust in my eyes at the oddest of times... Seems to happen a lot during sad movies, and long distance telecom TV commercials. Odd hey?)

Anyhow... Back  to the ducks. They tied in wonderfully with the life cycles unit my co-teacher has going; were a great start to my measurement unit and provided a fantastic opportunity for the kids to all have a shared experience about which to write a procedural text of their own as a formative pre-assessment. (They wrote instructions on 'how to hold a duckling'.) Pretty happy with that hat trick of tie-ins. I love finding opportunities like this to bring disparate parts of our curriculum together, even if with only a tenuous link like my ducklings hatching!

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 2.5 Literacy and numeracy strategies
Standard 3.2 Plan, structure and sequence learning programmes
Standard 3.4 Select and use resources  
Standard 4.1 Support student participation
Standard 4.3 Manage challenging behaviour