Welcome to 2016….well, almost!

Welcome to 2016…..well, almost! 

I know, I know!!!! We haven't even had Christmas yet but seeing as I fly off to Las Vegas for NYE (big whoop!) this year I know I won't have time to sort out my first day back in the downtime between Christmas and school starting again (oh poor me!).

I love my classroom during the run-up to Christmas but once all of those gorgeous cards and colourful calendars have been sent home and the tinsel is packed away, it looks a little sad and empty and I feel a little lost!

Luckily, I planned ahead and took some NYE themed photo booth pictures of my class ready to peg up  to overcome the miserableness of bare-walls syndrome and to kind of make me feel organised!! 

Obviously there is far more to the job of a teacher than making the walls pretty but….!

How do you approach the first day back with your class? Do you launch yourselves straight back into the routine? Do you take it easy and play a little fast and loose with the time-table? 

Me, I like to strike it somewhere in the middle. 

We're all tired (yes I mean WE ME!) and struggling with the sugar withdrawals but I'm also highly aware that every moment is a vital learning opportunity. 

Yes I am that mean teacher who likes to get them straight back into the habit of writing!

On the first day back I like to run some 'circle-time' type activities and give the children a chance to share what they have been doing over their time off- I learn an awful lot about them during these chats! 

We like to reflect on the year just gone and remember all of the fun we had in class- 

You can click here to snag yourself a copy from my TpT store! 

I love using these activities with the children as they celebrate all of the positives and the sense of community our class shared before the Christmas break. 

After we have had our morning snack and are feeling refuelled and energised I then like to introduce some more focused written work. 

This year I will be getting my children ready for the hard work ahead by making wishes and thinking of achievable goals. 

I don't want them to simply set a goal but also explain why they want to achieve it, what it will mean to them and how they will get there. 

Do you encourage your children to goal set? How do you go about it? 

I'd love to hear your plans for the first day back...

Phonics- Top 3 Tips & Tweaks

As you may know I'm a bit of a Phonics geek and I love finding new ways to spice up my lessons.

We follow Letters and Sounds at our school and I love the freedom it affords.

 I live by the 'Fast, Fun and Frequent' approach to my sessions and like to get the kids up and moving as much as possible.

In this post I've included 3 top tips or tweaks you might want to use to add a bit of pizzaz to your sessions too! 

As we all know one of the most valuable parts of a Phonics session is the 'Apply' part. It gives the children a glimpse into how they will actually use these skills in real life and show them that they CAN read! 

With my group, children who are needing more practise at Phase 2, tracking the text as they read is a big issue. Using text trackers (or partner pointers if they are reading in a pair) has given this key skill a massive boost. 

Yes they all have fingers but these are just so much more fun!

Fly swatters have added a great fun twist to my Phonics. 

Buy 2 for £1 in the pound shop and give your 'Revisit and Review' section a makeover too! 

I like to put the grapheme cards in the middle of a circle, have 1 kiddie shout out a sound and the children with the swatters have to race to splat it! This can be used when reading tricky words, practising blending or even applying their reading skills. 

To ensure maximum participation I split my group into 2 and use 4 swatters. 

I'm a firm believer that before a child can blend and segment using written sounds, they need to be able to do it orally. I adore teaching these skills using my little friend 'Freddy'. Freddy can only 'sound-talk' and so he whispers his instructions to me, I sound-talk them to my little friends and they blend the sounds to follow the instruction- it's lots of fun, active and an invaluable step.

 My puppet friend can also work in reverse- the children have to sound-talk to give him an instruction! Perfect! 

If you don't fancy using a puppet, why not try my 'Daisy says….' set to practise those all important blending skills too! 

Please let me know if you try out any of these ideas in your Phonics and how you got on.

How to 'do' Halloween in Year 2...

Hey guys, so… if you caught my periscope this afternoon they you will know that my blogging mojo has gone missing! 

I've searched and I've struggled to find it but rather than just giving up I've decided to try and win it back! 

I've taken matters into my own hands and 'forced' myself to blog tonight! 

It is a perfect opportunity to link-up for Five for Friday  with my favourite- Doodle Bugs Teaching 

This week has all been about Halloween in my classroom! 

Even though I teach Year 2 (1st Grade) I still incorporate many areas of continuous provision more commonly found in Foundation Stage units and I am a firm believer that play is an integral part of children's development.
Whilst we have to get our half term assessments done, I always like to add in some fun too! 

 This week has proven to me just how right this approach is….

I have adored my role-play area and so have the children. I had hay-bales left over from our Farm Shop role-play so I decided to mix the 'rural' look with the Halloween theme and create a pumpkin patch! Visually, it WOWed but beyond that…. it excited! 

I split some pumpkins open using a rolling pin (very therapeutic) and let the children explore the pumpkin 'guts'- they developed their own ideas such as counting out the seeds and discovering which pumpkin had the most. 

The children also came out with great comparative language when pulling the pumpkin apart 

and it was great to be a part of.

'This piece is very rough compared to the slimy, stringy piece' said one little girl as she ripped off a piece of the pumpkin flesh!

 Messy hands, slimy pumpkin pieces and 6 year olds= fantastic! 

I also placed a lovely odd and even sorting activity made by the lovely Brittany of Tickled Pink in Primary who was my very first SLANT box partner! 

It was a great hit! 

Even though I knew there would be very little opportunity to do formal Literacy lessons this week, I wanted to look at instructional writing with the class as, although the children had produced 2 sets of instructions for BIGwrites, we hadn't formally looked at them. 

I wanted to capture the children's attention and create a sense of mystery about the lesson to fit with the Halloween theme. Sure, I could of dressed up as a witch and taught in role but I decided to use the magic of technology to hook the learning this time.

In order to set the week up and discover what the children knew about instructions already I used the 'Morfo' app to create a witch. 

You can get this app for free in the iTunes App Store 

She sent us a message asking for our help- apparently her potion wasn't working and she wasn't sure she had written her instructions correctly. We took a look at them and decided they were not a good set of instructions at all! Leading on from this, in groups the children produced 'What makes a good set of instructions?' thought showers and fed back their ideas to produce a class poster for our Working Wall. 

With the help of this poster we fixed the witches instructions and then followed them.

 This was the truly magical part! 

The instructions were simple- only 3 ingredients- corn flower, food colouring and water…. 

any guesses yet? 

Her instruction made oobleck!

 Each child got to explore the outcome and their puzzled yet fascinated faces made my day! 

I loved this lesson- it was simple, straightforward and engaging!

 All things a Monday morning lesson should be and as a bonus- I knew straight away that my kiddies are experts at instructional writing and I  didn't need to dedicate much teaching time to the features. 

Fab! 

I then added the remaining oobleck to the Pumpkin Patch in a pumpkin bucket so they could continue to explore it independently. 

This drew out even more descriptive and comparative language…

'I prefer this to the pumpkin' said one little boy…'prefer'…. I nearly fell off my chair!! 

Had I not provided this independent exploration opportunity then I would NEVER had guessed this particular little one had such a sophisticated word in his vocabulary! Sad but true! 

This week we had interviews for our new Head Teacher and as part of it my class were being taught by the candidates. 

As I knew my day would be disrupted I didn't want to get my teeth sunk too deeply into a new mathematical concept so I decided to build upon our 2 times tables practise and explore doubling and halving. 

We doubled numbers using pumpkin stickers on a mat I had made. I differentiated this activity easily using dice. As soon as I saw children were confident doubling numbers 1-6, I gave them a dice with 2 digit numbers on to try- quick, easy and effective! 

Some of my little ones are beyond using objects and are really comfortable using the partitioning method to add so I saw this as an opportunity to build on their place value knowledge and teach them how to apply it to doubling too!

I created a new resource which we loved! 'Frankie says…' contains halving statement cards- some of which are true and some are false. The children have to use an appropriate method, for many of mine it was still using objects, to discover which applied to their card and sort them. 

I bagged some bargain mini Frankenstine's head basket- 6 for £1- and the children used these to share their starting numbers between. 

I put all of these activities out during our independent learning time too- I love watching those who may have found an activity a stretch be supported by their friends in a fun and relaxed learning activity. 

As we had recapped the features of instructions I thought it was a perfect opportunity for the children to independently explore and apply their instructional writing skills in a play situation. 

I turned my writing and exploration areas into a Potions Lab- I provided the children with objects, coloured water, sand and glitter, a cauldron and writing prompts. It was a massive hit and lots of fun! 

We love Finger Gym in our school to develop fine and gross motor skills and pencil grips- our Potions Lab asked the children to pick up small objects and use circular motions to stir their mixtures- perfect Finger Gym enhancement!  

Even our daily Finger Gym sessions were given a spooktacular make over! 

Apples and salad tongs…

 Picking up spooky table confetti and collecting in mini skeleton heads…

Using tweezers to remove spiders and ants from green jelly…

Adding and removing table confetti to create our own Halloween dough….

and combining our mathematical and fine motor skills to sort spiders with tweezers in the small world! 

It has been lots of fun in school this week- all topped off with spooky snacks, creepy costumes and ghoulish dancing! 

Take a look at our Halloween decorations…

How has your week been? 

Awesome I hope!

Classroom Reveal 2015

Well… it's finally here… tomorrow is my first day back at school. We have 2 days of training and then the kiddies come in on Monday. I'll be honest, I never feel 100% ready… I'm always more about 85% but thats's ok, right? 

So before the madness and tiredness of back to school hits I'm linking up with the lovely Ashley and Angie for this month's #2getherwearebetter link up and the wonderful girls of Blog hoppin' for the very first time as part of their Teacher Week! 

#realtalk alert

This is really only a part classroom reveal! 

Seeing as I have 2 days of in-school training (INSET) left then I still have things I want to tweak and tidy before my new little friends come in on Monday so I've taken pictures of the areas I am happy with.

Don't worry….I'll be updating my 'Classroom' page over the weekend with my full- on 2015-2016 classroom!

So…

I have a small board right outside of my classroom where the children's lockers are and I like to use it as my welcome board.

I loved last year's board soooo much that I knew it was going to be hard to beat. 

I like to mix up my backing paper and I think splattering it with paint looks so effective. 

I agonised over what text to put on the board and how to arrange it for ages but now that I've got it up I'm pretty happy (even though I can spot where it needs straightening out!) 

I used oversized KG and Hello Literacy fonts to make it pop!(thanks for the idea Ashley!)

The HUGE crayons just add that WOW I so love!

I love all things Glitter Meets Glue and Amie's glitter art supplies set looks amazing with the children's names on around my board. I'm also loving my Tallahassee Sunday pencil- I snagged it in a give away and I couldn't be happier!  

Let's go through the door!!! 

I have 2 parts to my classroom- the small entrance we call The Den has my sink area as well as a large set of shelves and it's where I have my library and small group area. 

When you walk in the first thing you see is my reading display- I decided that I would keep the same one up from last year seeing as it still match everything and it had no work from the children on it- 

To the left of my reading display board I have my library books and CAFE board…

I like to have my kiddos put their peg onto the ribbon to set their targets.

This area has cushions and book buddies so that the little ones can choose a book, curl up and read to themselves, a book buddy or a friend. When the big light is off and the lamps and fairy lights are twinkling away it's magical!

To the left of my CAFE board are the huge set of shelves!!! 

For the past 3 years they have had a curtain across them but this year I finally plucked up the courage to tackle them!!! 

Other than putting some labels onto the big plastic boxes and writing on the little chalkboard tags attached to my book baskets, I'm pretty much done with this area and I couldn't be happier!

Just beneath the big selves is a really cute set of pink cubbies from Ikea which I keep my Phonics resources in. There is also a comfy teacher chair, display board (yet to be backed) and a wall mounted whiteboard so this area is perfect for small group work especially because I can close the door into the classroom and it's nice and quiet! 

Straight opposite the big shelves, to the right of my main door is my sink area-

I have the wonderful Rachel Archer  of Archer's All Stars and her Periscope to thank for the amazing hessian ruffle boarder! I adore it!!! 

This board will have ribbon draped across it and I will peg up artwork during the course of the year but it's blank for now because on the first day back I like to do a 'Recipe for Success' activity from Educating Abroad which I will peg up here for a week or so.

I also kept my 'What's The Crack?' parent's board up from last year as I only changed it in January and I still love it! 

I spent some time yesterday getting this area ready for the first day back-

I'll put the morning activity or any letters to go out to parents onto the clipboard and children can put finished books which need changing into the basket. 

We use Accelerated Reader at our school so the small chalkboard sign will say 'Don't forget your peg' to remind the children who have returned a book to move their peg onto the 'I'm ready to take a quiz' poster. 

So…let's wave goodbye to 'The Den' area and 

step into my classroom! 

This is the area that I'm still tweaking so I've only included a few pictures for you today!

As you come into the room over on the right wall you are greeted by the boards I use the most.

My main boards aren't really boards!!! The paper is stapled straight into the plaster board!! 

I simply didn't have enough useable board space and so I spoke to my head when I first moved into the room 3 years ago and asked if this would be ok seeing as it would be a few small staple marks rather than lots of spots where the sticky tack had pulled paint off and, seeing as this was way cheeper than buying board, she kindly agreed! Yay!!!

 These boards are my Working Walls so their content gets changed almost fortnightly to match our current text type and Numeracy strand. The children have full access to these boards and often stick things on them or respond to questions. 

I snagged the whiteboard in the cute frame from The Range, it's also magnetic and will make a perfect place for me to pose maths problems and have the kiddos work them out. 

The shelving unit you can see the top of houses all of my manipulative, number lines and maths games so that the children can access them easily. 

To the right of my Working Wall is a new area this year. It used to be where my old and tired computers were and the board had our Learning Challenge questions on it. This meant that the board HAD to be changed EVERY half term and had things getting put up on it every week! Lots of work!!! Since I have another board in my role play area which I can use that as my main Learning Challenge board (I'll give you a sneak peak of that next week!) I've decided to make this one my Bucket Fillers board and I adore it!!!! 

I snagged the gorgeous posters for free from the amazing Miss May over at One Fab Teacher!

Seeing as this board will stay the same all year it will totally help me in my bid to work smarter not harder - something I really need to do!

Beneath the board is a set of shelves from Ikea- like the ones in The Den with 4 cubbies but long and thin instead. In each cubbie is a box with construction equipment in it and on top are 4 baskets with the children's work books in them. 

Here are a few small details from my classroom that I'm ready to share with you…

My marking holders currently hold the baseline assessments we need to do when we get back to school  seeing as I have no marking at the minute (whoohoo!) I also need to update my 'It doesn't get much better than this!' frame with a picture of my new class but seeing as they aren't in until next week then I'll just keep looking at my little cuties from last year for now as I hate empty frames!

How adorable are these cork boards from Wilkinson's?! 

We'll pin new vocabulary we find in our text up on them so that we can use it in our own writing.

And finally….I spent sometime yesterday adding these cute ribbons to my working walls! Why? No reason…they just look adorable and I looooove the heart push pins! 

I can't wait to get back to school now and add all of my finishing touches! 

Be sure to head back and check out my 'Classroom' page next week for a full classroom reveal!!! 

Don't forget to hop over to the other wonderful teachers in the #2getherwearebetter and Blog Hoppin' link-ups! 

Have a wonderful back to school guys