Friday Fun

It's the end of Week 1, Term 1 and I am exhausted! The first week takes a lot of energy and requires a lot of extra bits and pieces to get things underway. Time is spent organising the classroom, sorting and labelling stationery, collecting assessment and talking with teachers from the previous year. We've also been trying to piece together information for our parent night, structuring our timetable and planning our programs. Given that my evenings are usually very family oriented, I have been skipping my lunch break to try to fit everything in, and hoping that somehow I'll be able to get ahead of the ball sometime soon! On a personal learning level, I have been familiarising myself with the iDoceo app for iPad and supporting other teachers as they get started with it too.

But, let's face it. The first week back is about the kids - getting to know them, meeting their parents, enthusing them about the year ahead, and stomping out the unwanted behaviours early. So... here's some of the fun stuff the kids got up to this week.

Flap Book
Students made flap books containing their teacher's name, class, something they enjoyed from the first day, something they are looking forward to and some of their friends. We planned to take these home on the first day, however they needed a little more time so took them on the second day instead. These were designed to be a prompt for students and their parents to use to discuss the first day.

Portrait
Students created a portrait of themselves depicting how they see themselves as adults. They also wrote a text to go with the image. These will be displayed in our unit on completion.

FRIENDS Values
My school has developed a values curriculum around an acronym for FRIENDS. This is taught at the beginning of each year and referred to continually. This week students were engaged in a quiz related to the values and completed a worksheet which is now displayed in the classroom.

House Meetings
Our swimming carnival is just around the corner, so today students met in house groups to select Year 6 students as their House Captains. They then practiced their war cries.

Of course there have been many other activities through the week, but some of those will form other posts I plan to write this weekend! Bring on week 2!