The Course-factor

It's amazing what a difference being out of the classroom for one day makes to one's mood and mind-set! I have been feeling very very disillusioned about school etc over the last week or so, and on Wednesday, I went on an NQT ICT course. I felt so happy and positive after it, I even managed to write a 3 week unit plan for Literacy 'Dramatic conventions', after being inspired by it! Some courses can be very dull, but from start to finish, this course was entertaining, thought-provoking, informative and massive fun! By the end of the day (for me this is good!) I had made 2 podcasts 'mock-ups' of an advert and a newsreport, I had helped to make an animated film using Digi-blue and Movie-maker, made a musical photo-guide to my borough using Photostory and learnt lots about various software and e-safety, oh and how to import Utube into my smartboard, so I can use clips of Newsbroadcasts for my lessons (very hard to do a unit on the dramatic conventions and scripts of broadcasts inc news, weather, adverts and natural history programmes without using it) without the worry of nasties being exposed to my kids or encouraging them to use it! It was great fun! I will try to post our film on here, if I can find the link!
Tomorrow in DT we are making junk instruments and I had forgotten to ask my kids to bring er- junk in, so have been frantically searching my house for old pots etc! However am very pleased with myself as I have made a set of mini panpipes from cutting up an old cracker and a bit of sellotape! Trying to get them to think outside the box (the box which has elastic bands around it and is a homemade guitar: BO-RING!) Now I am going to search for junk ideas!

Right, must dash. Cheerio for now...

Return to the forbidden planet

Hello there! Feel like a general waffle in blogosphere!! (to avoid art planning-eek!)
So I have been back 2 days now- feels like a life-time!!!!!! (or life sentence, depending on if the cup is 1/2 empty, 1/2 full!).
Ahrgh, it was wet play ALL day today!!!!!!!!!!!!! ALL day-and so my young monsters were generally monstrous!!! Have to say though, it was always going to be a risk allowing them to play random instruments as part of our first 'sound' lesson in Science! So I provided them with a series of instruments to bash, crash, wallop, pluck, blow and scrape etc to get them to discuss and think about how sounds change and think of all the sound vocab, asking them provoking questions to find out what they knew. It was manic! (Hyper is not a suitable superlative) And when I asked them to provide me with words to come up with that we could write up to use for a concept map, rather than loud, soft, muffle, ring, high, low, pitch, duration etc etc, which I was hoping for-what did they come up with?
sizzle, crash, boom, ping, slam, zoom, bang, oh and er- mezzo forte, mezzo piano.
Lovely onomatopoeia, but not much help in helping me determine what they already know about sound!
Then after they'd written their prior knowledge in their books (I DREAD reading it! Not that the cup is half empty or anything!) I provided a series of activities
such as hitting a drum skin with rice grains on it, a plucked elastic band, a tip of a vibrating tuning-fork placed in a beaker of water, a ruler clamped to a table and tapped at one end, a cymbal that has been hit, a speaker for a stereo system, plucking a guitar string, touching their their larynx as they talk
and asked them to try the activities: to feel and observe and feel and discuss and then feed back their observations to the class, which they dutifully did and mostly admirably with pertinent comments made, exactly as I wanted (they all acknowledged movement for example) and they were very excited about it and by the end of the lesson, were able to tell me about vibrations and what these look like etc, but they were just soooooooo loud and excitable. And then C (very angry, attention-seeking) had a hissy fit which was not very pleasant- his behaviour really does upset people.

So, again, I find myself thinking -ahrgh, teaching is horrid, and yet some lessons are fab! They were excellent in Literacy this morning (not least the aforementioned C) and dealt really sensitively with the Film narrative module we are doing at moment. In case you are interested, you can download the film we are studying here. Maths was always going to be horrid as it was TIME!!!!! (calculating time intervals)

Tomorrow during my NQT time, I am going to potentially spend it in the Foundation stage- I am fearful. It always scares me going into Reception or Nursery, but it is important to understanding where they come from, and the different levels of differentiation and the importance of tactile learning.

Anyway, to avoid this just being a boring teaching blog, one exciting thing I have discovered is the delightful JJ Feild (who may have been mentioned in my blog before as one of my fave actors) is making his London Westend debut next month, and I will hopefully go to see him in a play. He has a delightful warmth as an actor, perhaps I have only seen him in mostly period dramas, but I always get a lovely sense of person in things I see him in, so it will be interesting a) to see him on stage and b) to see him in something modernish.

Anyway, I guess that Art is now hammering at my door, demanding I complete it!

Tooreloo!

(That's Harmony by the way, thought she might make the blog less sleep inducing and more fluffy...)