Sound and Letter relationships

 

I have a small group of students who are still needing work on initial sounds.

 

So I have put together this pack for them. It is bright, engaging and should be fun for them to use.

 

If you go to Teachers Pay Teachers or Teachers Notebook you can download two free Alphabet Keys in the preview to use.

 

You can play snap, go fish, memory, use them as a word all or as flash cards. There are six sets of different colours/colors so they are easy to sort and pack up.

 

 

 

 

Happy Mother's Day

Today is Mother's Day and what a gorgeous day for it! I know there are children all around the world giving handmade gifts and cards that we as teachers have spent an agonising amount of time on.

But you know what, it is worth it. 

 

Like me, I am guessing that as a mum our most treasured moments are those wobbly gifts, handwritten messages and hugs we get with a 'lovely' breakfast in bed.

 

As a mum of two teenage children, I have a box of said gifts and treasure each and every one of them. Later on today my two kids will cook a lunch for all of us, yes a late lunch as they are sleeping in. 

 

We took our 18 year old to Melbourne last night to see a band ( Tony and I dropped him off and went and had dinner), when we picked him up, he said thanks, I got a hug and as it was after midnight a 'happy Mother's Day mum'. 

 

Our daughter was with a friend in Ballarat and texted me at midnight. That's special. 

 

Last weekend I spent some time with my own mum, who was visiting from QLD and will ring her or Skype later today. 

 

So a big HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY to all mums. 

Photo from Mother's Days' gone by

 A photo of a Mother's Day gone by....

Mother's Day today!

 

Mother's Day Craft

                                      We will be celebrating Mother's day on Sunday.

 

My students are excited about their flower craft task.

 

I saw this on pinterest and we have put our own spin on it.

 

I was so impressed with how the students followed instructions and managed to complete the task by themselves.

 

We gave a huge Mother's Day stall at school and this will be an exciting time for all Mum's on Sunday. 

 

We put a photo inside one of the flowers to give it a special look.

 

We just loved them when we were finished.

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY

My new tabs

I am loving my new tabs. Thanks to Dreamlike Magic Designs who made them to match my blog, I can now think about enriching what is on my blog. Some tabs are still under construction - check out the cute graphic while I fiddle and get the pages ready for publication.

Wacky Wednesday - join me

Join me for Wacky Wednesday!!!!!!! See details below..

 

Here is my story for this month. A few years ago, in another school and another state and a much younger version of me, in a school nowhere near the sea. A principal promised me a feed of yabbies for helping him to get great scores in footy tipping. I was under the impression they were ocean creatures. He strung me along for an entire footy season - I trusted him! He told me he would hire a bus for my grade, take care of all the notes and we would still leave at 9 and be back by 3. The day came and he said that we would go for a walk first, we headed into the bush - I was bewildered. We came to a dam (like a pond) and he asked me to pull on a rope, out came a huge pigs head and attached were all these yabbies. Joke was on me as my grade were in on it as well. So no trip to the beach for this Queenslander. But those yabbies were amazing.....

 

We work with amazing people, little people and there are many funny, crazy things we hear. see and do! This can be a funny job we do five days a week  - so our stories may be old and just now getting an airing. Even if there are just two or three of us - share the funny things that happen. Laughter is great medicine.

 

The rules are simple

- share a crazy comment, incident, task or event that has happened to you in the past week/month/year etc.

- protect the privacy of our kids/parents/colleagues....unless it is about you and you want to own up!

- link up below and link back to Paula's Place and Wacky Wednesday

Word Work

Here are some gorgeous photos of our Preps doing formal LSCWC using their best fit words.

This is a group using whiteboards to do LSCWC.

This group is using salt to do LSCWC.

A linky for all Aussie bloggers

A big shout out to all Aussie bloggers.

As we grow in number it would be great to see where we all come from.

 

We could use this to get a blogger meet up happening one day......

 

Head on over to my blog

Click on my Aussie Blogger tab

Link up under the correct heading for your state/territory and watch our blogger buddies grow!

Please invite Aussie bloggers you know to add their names.

 

I am working on buttons for each state/territory and will add these as I do them. I want them to pop a bit more. Maybe one of our Aussie bloggers has a better idea for these.

Some new skills for me

I have with the help of some blogging friends worked out how to add my blog name as a signature at the end of a comment post.  In the end this is what works for my blog- so thanks to the amazing bloggers I now know!

<i><b><a href="http://your url/">your blog name</a></b></I> 

I am also pushing myself to learn how to make a button for what I hope will be an amusing linky party - called WACKY WEDNESDAY. I  am hoping that this will be about a crazy comment, incident, task or event that has happened to you in the past week.

 

We work with amazing people, little people and there are many funny, crazy things we hear. see and do! This can be a funny job - but remember we need to protect the privacy of our kids/parents - so our stories may be old and just now getting an airing....keep names out of it and anything that may identify people, unless it is about you and you want to own up!

 

I am hoping to have it ready by next Wednesday and hey, if only 1 or 2 people link up - I will still have a laugh. I am aiming at doing this only once a month. So get your funny stories ready and spread the word.

What is a photo story?

A photo (picture) can paint a thousand words or so they say! It is actually true. If you take a photo of your grade or part of your grade you take a snapshot of what they are actually like.

 

I have used a free program called photohide to protect the faces of my munchkins.

 

I shared this photo with a team of teachers when I was trying to stress that each child is different and what is best fit for one is not best fit for another. Their faces where not hidden and the task more powerful.

 

 

When you look at how each one sits - one is looking over the arm of the chair, one is leaning forward and waiting to see what is going to happen, another is so laid back he is almost asleep. One is looking at others to find clues as how they should behave, one is holding hands with another and wants to be secure. One just fidgets!

 

How many of you see children from your own grade here? How do we tailor learning to fit all, challenge all and exceed potential for all?

 

Out team have decided that these are some of the ways we can help address this

- team teaching

- team planning

- team logs

- anecdotal notes

- team coaching

- data walls

- point of need teaching

- differentiation

- professional learning for us

- daily 5 in English

-iSURF in Maths

 

assess - plan - teach - assess - plan - teach

 

LOVE WHERE I WORK......

More LSCWC

I had to come home early today as I was struck with a tummy bug that came so quickly. After a few hours sleep and some water and bread rations I think I am on the mend. It is never a good time to be out of a classroom and I was also absent from our team meeting.

 

Before I had to go, we had some preps who are doing such a great job with their word recognition when reading that we have started doing LSCWC with them .

 

Yesterday I blogged about using small whiteboards for this and how successful that was with this group. So we are about to use this book to cover the words we are looking at. Watch this space for how it turns out. We are trying to create independent writers and readers and this is one strategy.

 

For our Aussie bloggers/readers how are you processing our new curriculum for writing? The work samples for Foundation and Year 1 have us working really hard. They are above what our expectations were last year using our Victorian Curriculum for Prep and Grade 1.

 

Even though our cohort last year were well above the expected level by the end of the year, we have a bit of work this year but feel confident that we will have the majority of our students above the expected level.

 

We already have a core of students above in reading for June. Something to celebrate.