No, it's my pre end of year reflection. But really, it's just a quick update with photos and I'm only writing this because I just finished reports and this was next on my to do list.
It's been rather hectic, and I still feel like I have so much to do! I'm going to add captions to all of the photos, rather than write a big long story... I'll save the big long story for next time, which will be soon, I promise!
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| Tuakana-teina. We began visiting Room 3 (juniors) once a week, teaching them new skills and learning with them. Our first session was spent outdoors, and the children loved it! |
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| Te Reo - Mrs T & I came up with a brilliant plan, to continue teaching our combined classes Te Reo. I am becoming more confident through having to prepare a lesson every second week, and I practise (with a little help from the cool online Maori dictionary) very hard before each lesson! I'm actually enjoying coming up with neat ways to allow them to use Te Reo, and I'm also learning a great deal from Mrs T! |
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| Cootie Catchers, designed to allow children to practise asking questions and responding appropriately. It was also a great way to reinforce things they already knew, such as numbers, colours and basic commands. And it took me ages to create the template... just letting you know that! |
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| Tuakana-teina: card games, and the children are having such a lovely time! |
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| The thing that took up most of my classroom for almost 2 terms! Bernina Fashion Awards, well worth it, a great experience for the children and they gained some fabulous skills along the way. The prizes were pretty impressive too, but there is no way I could have judged, especially after seeing all the work put into them! |
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| Show time! |
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| Tuakana-teina: this session was spent making adorable bookmarks. The children buddied up, explaining instructions and helping with cutting and folding after we had a trial run in Room 7. |
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| Room 9 creating papier mache bird sculptures with me while Mrs J teaches my class drumming. I'm not sure that my class are doing very well... yet! But hers are very enthusiastic young artists, and I've loved being able to extend their skills in visual art. I doubt very much I'd be any good at teaching drumming. Oh, shouldn't have said that, so not growth mindset! |
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| The mural, finally underway... |
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| A little further along... will add final photos when it's done. Might be a few weekends work to complete, but I am enjoying myself very much. I have to remember not to be too hard on the children who are helping paint, but sometimes they just aren't striving for accuracy enough for my liking! It all will need a second coat anyway. |
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| Te Reo: playing shops! |
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| I just put these ones in just because! Seriously, this was super cool, we made exploding books and I didn't even really prepare for it, you know those lessons you just make up as you go along? So often those are the most successful ones. Maybe because we are learning with the children. Or haven't the same expectations we do when we plan it all so carefully? I don't know, but it was really fun and they were all so proud of themselves! |
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| See?!!! | |
One other thing, and it's going to sound silly, but when I was around the age the children in my class are now, like hundreds of years ago, I got a Rubik's cube for my birthday. I tried so hard to solve it. I remember the most I could do was 2 sides. When we began growth mindset all that time ago, I thought really hard about something I'd always wanted to achieve, and the Rubik's Cube popped into my head. I figured one day I might buy one and look into how I could possibly figure it out.
A couple of weeks ago, Ethan brought his cube to school. Mackay picked it up and solved it! In less than 2 minutes! I was absolutely amazed. He told me he would teach me how to solve it if I would teach him how to make a rather complicated origami rose. He spent quite some time (over a weekend) writing instructions for me, and arrived at school on the Monday, where I was ready and waiting with my brand new cube ( I actually bought 4, one for my nephew, a 2 x 2 cube for grandson who is almost 5 now, and a bear shaped one for other grandson who is nearly 3 -and I'll probably struggle trying to solve theirs!) anyway here we were, and Mackay goes, "copy me, copy what I do" like about a million times, and eventually I had solved it! But not really because he was telling me what to do every step of the way. I took his instructions home after photocopying them for Ethan, and practised, and got stuck, and practised, and I really did have growth mindset because I made mistakes and I learnt from them. Cutting a long story short now... I CAN do it! I still need to look at the instructions occasionally, and sometimes I go anticlockwise instead of clockwise or left instead of right, but I can do it. So can Ethan... without even looking. My next goal is to solve it without looking at instructions at all, and then be able to do it really fast.
And yes, I did teach Mackay how to make a rose :)
It's so neat to hear your progress with Growth Mindset, something we are encouraging our akonga to do and sometimes we forget to model it back to them. Loving your enthusiasm with learning te reo, and the activities the kids are doing look awesome!
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