A Day for Presents

While many people out of the loop believe that teachers only work during term time, the rest of us know better. Being very eager to get started on setting up my new space and feel settled in, I started going in and annoying the skeleton staff 2 weeks before the required teacher prep week was to begin.

While many days were thankless cleaning and furniture / building rubble moving days, this one was a good one:)

Some of my lovely new IT toys - I do love unwrapping Mac products :)

AND...

This amazing new double-height sink was fitted and plumbed in. It was something that I chatted to the principal about during my orientation visit last year and whammo! the maintenance and building crew realised my dream. Feeling so blessed :) and new furniture is on its way too. Will post about that when it arrives.

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My New Art Space

The classroom that was to house the new junior school Art Space (and ME :) used to be a Tech room filled with computers that were visited by classes on a roster. This mode of IT access had been phased out and now the space was to be mine to transform into a learning hub for the Visual Arts.

Here are some images of what I started with.

My lockable storage cupboard

The builders making a start on cutting a hole in the wall for a set of french doors

The soon-to-be-installed French doors, new linoleum flooring and some old furniture still to be removed...

The adjacent kitchen which should prove useful...

The mini green screen in the corner...

and my clear-story windows for great light.

I'll post about my classroom decorating soon :)






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A Fork in the Road

So I haven't published for a while and you may have been wondering why?

In short - life happened (in a good way). My teaching career has taken a 180 turn in a completely new and wonderful direction. At the end of 2013, I was offered a position as a Visual Arts specialist teacher at a nearby school, from Jan 2014. Those of you who read my posts regularly will know how much I love teaching this curriculum area in my class and the offer of teaching it full time was too enticing to turn down. Although I must admit, I do miss seeing my class progress in areas of Literacy and Numeracy as well as Inquiry skills,  confidence and self-belief.

So... I have been finding ways of supporting these within my arts programme and found myself re-adapting many of my common classroom practises to my singular subject area.

It has been a change, teaching students from ages 5 though to 11 and a challenge remembering the name of every student in the junior school...WOW!
Thankfully I teach 2 year levels a term so its only a third of the school at a time.

Another bonus about my new school (besides also being IB) is that it is a full school starting at Kindergarten and going right through to senior college. I will get to witness the future accomplishments of many of my junior school students as they move though their schooling years.

This transition has meant new resources needed and I am in the process of finalising many of these to post about, so stay tuned ;)

Hope you all have enjoyed a blessed 2014 so far.


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Writing Genres - and IB concept keys

Hello friends,

As the end of Year 6 approaches for my students (and with it the end of their PYP), we reflected on the many genre of writing they they have read / written over these years. After they brainstormed all these, I asked each group to select a genre that they felt they knew the most about.

For this lesson I used the following resource (which our school supplied us with) but I traced back to this website where you too can download a set.
http://engagethereader.wordpress.com/

I laminated them in full size and half size for displays and group-work, as well as quarter size and grouped on a ring for individual use.

The students 'blind-drew' a concept key for their group. Using the concept that they had drawn, they discussed their genre of writing. First they came up with questions and discussed/solved these as a group
e.g. of questions for Narrative genre with the Connected key:

How are narratives connected to other writing genre (compare and contrast)?
What connections can I make between narratives I read and narratives I write?
How are the different parts of a narrative connected to each other?
How can you connect the orientation to the conclusion?
....and so on....

We had great fun sharing our ideas back to the class and it gave me great insight into the students' thinking / knowledge around writing genre / conceptual understanding.

We followed this up by allowing students freedom of choice for their final writing assessment piece, helping them to play to their writing strengths. Students could choose between Persuasive, Narrative, Explanation and Recount (personal) as these have scope to show a development of ideas. I really enjoyed marking the variety of writing that we got out of this model. One student wrote a particularly engaging piece about our calendar art lesson from the point of view of her art pencil.

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Maths - Wondering and Noticing

Hello friends,

Annie Fetter at NCTM Ignite

For all you fellow maths teachers, here is a  little video full of great ideas. Well worth a watch. These concepts are  transdisciplinary so apply to all areas of engaging learners. Take a look.

Have a great weekend :)

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Poetry - End of Year Reflections Poetry Writing lesson

Hello friends,
It is Term 4 down here in New Zealand and we are all winding up the end of our year with final assessments due soon, Term 4 reports to write and wrapping up our year in general. Two years ago I came across a poem in this School Journal.

This great reflection poem by Maria McMillan, jumped out straight away as a creative way to sum up our year.

And here is a close up of the words:

Aren't they great - you can just picture the year's learning events unfolding through the words. I decided to use it as a model text for my Year 4's and reflect on the year that was. Everyone published their poem digitally as I was teaching a 1:2 digital class at the time. Once we finished, I printed a copy of each poem for the kiddies to take home in their portfolios, and a copy for the wall too. This way, when my new class arrived at the start of the new year, they had these awesome poems from the previous class to read and think about what lay ahead for them.

Here are a few samples from my kiddies (Dec 2011).

These kiddies were all 9  at the time.

I didn't teach this poem again last year because I was changing levels and moving up to Y6 and my new Y6's wouldn't want to know what my Y4's learned about last year. But now that I am about to complete this year, I will do them again with my 10/11 year olds. Simply dying to see what they produce and hope to post samples for you.

If you would like to have a go at writing these great poems with your students, I have written a lesson for it which includes instructions, graphic organisers and teacher models. Student handouts are in both UK/US spelling, where needed. 

These lesson guides are available from both my TPT store - One Teacher's Journey HERE,

and from my website - Help Me Learn HERE

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Poetry - Write Colour Poems lesson plan

Hello friends,
This next poetry unit on Colour Poetry compliments this art unit I wrote for inquiring into the Element of Colour

This is part of a series on the elements of art which also includes Element of Line HERE and Element of Texture HERE

Colour Poetry is a fun way to explore metaphors and abstract thinking. By comparing colour to objects, actions and ideas, children extend their thinking to encompass poetic concepts.

This unit supports quality writing with graphic organisers in both US and UK spelling, that makes it easy to create quality imagery.

Each student will create a unique poem because they relate these images to their personal lives and experiences. For this reason, it can also work well when combined with portraiture art, like these lessons available HERE

 

Writing frameworks are provided and teacher models with a poem exemplar are all there to guide you through.

 You can grab your very own copy of Colours Poetry over at my TPT store - One Teacher's Journey HERE

or on my website at Help Me Learn HERE

What other teachers have said about Metaphor Poems about Colour/Color!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "A high quality resource. Visually appealing with all related content displayed in an accessible way."

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