Construction Art

Over the last 4 weeks while I have been teaching the children of Room 8 have been brainstorming and creating visual art pieces using egg cartons.

Their brief was that it could use egg cartons, had to be made in 3 sessions and that was basically it, they had free creative reign and the internet to help them research ideas.

The outcome has been an awesome collection of objects and critters of all shapes and sizes, there has been a huge amount of work go into some of these and a great deal of creativity!

Check it out...

 Shontelle and her chicks!

Tess and her cat

 

Travis and his caterpillar

Jared and his cat

Zeke and his mushroom 

Bella and her chick

Molly and her girl

Reuben and his aircraft 

Amy has quite a collection of cute wee critters 

Ella and her dragon

Alice and her dragon 

Callum and his turtle 

Zeus and his dragon (the original)

Matthew and his helecopter 

There are still a few more to come, as some will be finished during exploration time on Friday! But thought I would post what we have so far as I know there has been some interest in these awesome creations! 

Also it means I can procrastinate from what I should be doing but still be productive! 

P.s. Gosh I am going to miss these children! :(

Final week of my final placement

Wow it is that time again, where have the last four weeks gone? This week I am sort of floating around Ranzau, I will spend the first part of the morning in Room 8 taking the roll, oral language and spelling. Then I will have a look in some of the other classrooms and see how other teachers do things, it is a great opportunity for me!

This afternoon I was saying thanks to the children of Room 8 for putting up with me teaching for the last 3 weeks and they all started "is today your last day", and several asked if I could stay until the end of the year or get a job at Waimea Intermediate next year so that I can see them... if only it was that easy! But I love their enthusiasm, nothing makes you feel like you have done a good job like 22 happy faces looking at you!

So this is my FINAL placement, this time next week I will have handed in my folder from placement and be getting ready for my final 3 papers for the semester and the degree! This semester will be an interesting one with our professional inquiry paper being all about CV's, job interviews and getting ready for the real world! Then one of our other papers is special and inclusive education which I have no doubt will be fascinating, and then for our final paper we got to choose! I have chosen sustainability and social justice, just the title sounds interesting! All of this is jammed into just 3 short months though, with our final day of university on the 13th November, followed by graduation on the 19th December!

Last night I was organising my calendar and freaking out a bit, there is just so much going on in the next few months, can I just have a week off in there somewhere?

It has been a blast at Ranzau, it is an awesome school with an amazing bunch of teachers who have been welcoming, supportive and encouraging, especially my associate teacher Megan, without whom I would have collapsed in a heap somewhere to be found by the cleaner! Room 8 is lucky to have her, and I have been very fortunate to be mentored by her, I have learnt SO much!

So thank you Ranzau, Room 8, Dave, Megan and all the rest of the team, thank you to the children, and their parents for an amazing few weeks! Hopefully I have some spare time to come back between now and the end of the year!

P.s. Ignore the $46, sadly that is not how much it has cost me to become a teacher! 

Letters to Sarah

Each week the children of Room 8 write a letter to their teacher as part of their reading program, it usually starts off with some detail about their week and what is going on in their lives and then moves into its main purpose which is to discuss their reading and the book they are reading. This week I asked all of the students to address their letters to me as I was going to respond to them all so I could leave them all a wee note in their books. Their tasks for reading were written up on the board so my name was visible to all to see but I am having a wee chuckle at all the different variations o "Dear Sarah's" I have received...

• Sharah
• Serah
• Shea
• Sera
• Sherah
• Shra
• Shara

It has taken me back to my childhood where my friends often spelled my name incorrectly. I just thought I would share as it has made me smile, but the real joy is the letters, they are full of thought and show a great understanding of the books these children are reading. The catchphrase is "Reading is thinking" and these children sure are thinking about their reading and it is wonderful to see as a teacher, nothing makes me happier than hearing a child say "can we read some more"... you know you are destined to be a teacher when things like that make you smile. :)

This week was my last week in full control in Room 8 at Ranzau, I still have one more week at the school where I will make the most of my opportunities to watch some of the other teachers do the amazing things they do and to gather some more information I need for my folder. This weekend is the first weekend in the last month where I have had plenty of time to relax and chill out and it has been awesome, but I am glad that I still have one more week with the children of Room 8, they make me smile on a daily basis and I can't wait to have a class of my own. 

Another highlight of this week was receiving a wee treat from one of the boys in "my" class, in the form of a truffle that his Mum had made, it definitely made my day, it was the sweetest gesture and also delicious! 

Time flies...

WOW time flies when you are having fun... aka so busy that you don't know what day it is... just kidding I know it is Monday! 

Today has been a great day after a slightly overwhelming end to last week but I am determined to make the most of my learning opportunities and today was a new day and a fresh start! 

I have just realised that this is my last week (EVER) of pretending to be a teacher! Next week I will still be at Ranzau but hopefully, with the other teachers permission, having a wander around the other classes and seeing what they are up to and how they do it. Then even more hopefully I will have a job next year so instead of pretending to be a teacher I will be a real life teacher! WOW how terrifying and exciting... and still a wee way off yet! 

Today we began a new BP challenge.... Emergency Stretcher:
Scenario: A young child in your tramping party has been injured and needs to be taken to safety urgently. All that is available to make the stretcher are newspapers, string and sellotape. The trek out will be difficult and as you start the rear stretcher bearer is hit in the face by a branch and temporarily blinded.

The students have to build the stretcher, strong enough to carry 8kg over an obstacle course... the challenge is they only have newspaper, sellotape and string with which to build said stretcher (as these materials are usually readily available in the bush...)

After beginning this activity (to finish on Thursday afternoon) we were intending to go out for some PE, but the weather had other plans! So we headed over to the multipurpose room (kind of like a small hall or large classroom) and had a wee concert (thanks Katie and others... keep an eye on the Room 8 blog for videos) followed by some cooperative games...

First off we completed the hula hoop challenge, with a twist... boys vs. girls. 
Have the group form a circle holding hands. Ask two people to let go of their grip long enough for them to place their hands through a hula hoop before rejoining them. 
The team task is to pass the hula hoop around the circle in a specified direction until it returns to the starting point. 

The girls won :)

Then we did the human pretzel which is where everyone stands in a circle and hold hands... they then knot themselves up and two people have to try and untangle them! See below for photos...
It was fun to watch and they nearly got untangled, but we had to stop in order to reduce the chances of arms being pulled off and other nasty things like that. 
The feedback at the end was that peoples hands were sweaty... 

What we have been up to this past week...

I have FINALLY (almost) caught up on my planning for next week so I have time to procrastinate with a blog post before dinner... roast pork, smells amazing! YUM

This past week has been a busy one, as any week in a school is...

For fitness this week it has been up to the sports committee to set up activities including, netball or rugby passes, shooting netball hoops, dribbling at and shooting for soccer goals, as well as basketball dribbling and shooting hoops. The older children then move around the activities with their younger buddies, encouraging all sorts of great leadership skills as well as allowing the younger buddies a chance to have some one on one coaching.

On Thursday for oral language we discussed "Kei te pehea koe?" which is "how are you?" in Māori. With the response being "Kei te              ahau." options for responses we practiced are as follows...

Pai (fine) 

Harikoa (happy) 

Pōuri (sad) 

Māuiui (sick) 

Hiakai (hungry) 

Hiainu (thirsty) 

Ngenge (tired) 

Hōhā (bored or annoyed)

We are still working on speeches for writing, with the students practicing planning, writing and presenting (to a small group) a speech on one of the following topics: myself (themselves), their pets, their family or their hobbies. These are great topics for speeches as children (or anyone) generally know lots about these topics, making it easy to talk about them, and we all know how tricky and stressful speeches can be so the less stress the better! :)

We have been continuing to look at measuring time in maths, with the children tackling some complicated problem solving tasks, they have amazed me with their willingness to attempt challenging tasks, the level of their engagement is amazing. Next week we are moving on to measuring distances, with a challenge involving measuring objects and areas around the school. 

Our first BP challenge was building the longest possible bridge capable of supporting a 500g weight, made only out of newspaper, string, 2 sheets of A4 card and sellotape. There were varying degrees of success in the bridge building but a great deal of cooperation in the teams. We had one clear winner in the challenge, with their bridge being over a metre long! It was the strangest "bridge" I have ever seen but it did the job! Check out some photos here: http://room8ranzau.blogspot.co.nz/2014/08/co-operative-work.html

The students will be completing another BP challenge again this coming week, after discussing what went well for them in terms of cooperation, and how they could improve. We will also be discussing how we can use these cooperative skills outside the classroom. We also discussed some of the things that good sports do at the end of a competition, I am confident that I will see these things manifest in Room 8 after the next challenge is completed. :)

We have continued on with our egg carton creations, with some students almost finished and others in the midst of more complicated creations. Their creations are incredible, the only issue we have had was with the impatience, waiting for the glue to dry! (Featured on the Room 8 blog http://room8ranzau.blogspot.co.nz/) I'll leave you with some photos of these creative geniuses! 

 

Pretending to be a teacher

So this past week I have been teaching in Room 8, and it has been smooth sailing, a few bumpy patches as there always is when you try to walk in someone else's shoes but overall it has been a good week.

It has also been an exhausting week, and I have truly had my eyes opened to the workload of a teacher... there is always something to be planning or marking or doing.

Room 8 (and the rest of the senior syndicate) are busy working on speeches, and thinking of speeches as a hamburger... leading to much discussion about what everyone likes in their burgers... it was well established that this is a favourite meal in most households!

We have also been looking at time in maths, with converting digital and analogue time to 24 hour time, most of the children seem to have a great understanding of this now, thanks to a couple of class experts explaining it in a way they all understood! 

It was skipping for fitness at Ranzau last week and there were children skipping before school, at break times and showing their parents after school as well! They have some smooth moves like the crisscross and double jump! Very impressive indeed! 

We began looking at our construction art projects with the children getting to choose what to make using egg cartons... there was a lot of excitement once they got online and had a look at some things that others have made! The plan is for them to take photos of and record the steps of their individual craft project with the aims of creating a Room 8 blog post with instructions on how to create these egg-y masterpieces, so keep your eyes peeled in the coming weeks! 

For inquiry this term the focus is on cooperation and competition, the students have been doing a lot of work in teams and small groups working on their cooperative skills, especially working as a team and communication. They had to complete an activity (in silence) getting themselves in order of their birthdays (month and day), it was hilarious to watch and took them awhile but they got there in the end and I was very impressed with their perseverance in completing the task! Next week they are doing some BP challenges that will further promote their teamwork and cooperation, with a wee bit of competition thrown in! 

There were lots of children with plans for more exciting weekends than me, but I have had a productive one getting lots of reflection and planning done for the week ahead! 

Yesterday I applied to graduate, which is VERY exciting, and seems so close, yet also so very far away! I feel a little bit like a mother hen counting her chickens before they hatch, but that is the way of life when large numbers of people have to be organised! But I am very excited that those who are most important to me can come, especially as it is 6 days away from Christmas... lets just hope I can get time off work...

Here is me being a goof, and trying to make my student teacher friends smile :)