Design

The early morning mist soon lifted leaving the garden in a golden glow but with all the cobwebs highlighted by the remaining dew. A mile along the road I was back in the mist then at Shirwell the mist was just above the hedges on either side of the road. More ground level mist on the way to town and by the time I got to school it had all cleared. Lots of fun art activities going on in my classroom today. I can't wait until Medusa and Poseidon's heads are assembled. Hope the snakes don't keep falling off. We had a long staff meeting after school but there was still enough time for me to spend an hour weeding in the garden before the sun left our valley. Only 6 more early mornings before the school holidays start although I still have to go in for a non-pupil day on the first Monday of the holiday.

Life has been a pile of poo recently and today just got worse. At school the visiting artist who was supposed to be working in my class was rescheduled and I didn't find out till half way through the morning, I was left without any help in the class as the previously cancelled plan to have my teaching assistant work in another class got reinstated and the promised student for the week is also working in another class. Luckily it's arts week and my class are very creative. I was able to guide them towards a few ideas and then supervise the children painting their Greek temples including the 3ft high model made by a group of enthusiastic boys. My role was mainly to supply paint and wipe paint from the floor, carpet! and faces. At lunchtime I finally phoned the hospital to ask oh so politely when my appointment was as it had been 6 months since I saw the spinal consultant only to be told that I had been discharged because I had failed to turn up for an appointment that I never re...

We had heavy rain in the night which continued on and off through the day. Driving up the hill in the morning there was steam coming off the road and the low clouds were reaching down in tendril towards the valleys. During the day it dried up enough to so that the children could go out to play though we did have some heavy downpours. My afternoon was spent on PPA time glued to my lap top working on a million entries for the on-line tracker. I think I've ticked all the necessary boxes but I shall put off starting checking each of the end of term reports until tomorrow. There are apparently 51 boxes I have to check on each one!! Right now all my stress is directed towards tomorrow morning when I shall be having a lesson observation followed by an hour's performance management meeting. I've chosen to teach a literacy lesson continuing the work we have been doing based on the story of Perseus and Medusa. Once that is over and I've checked all the reports I can focus on...

We finally had our Sports Day today after 2 cancellations due to the wet weather. Because a parent complained that we cancelled the last time in the morning (even though the weatherman accurately predicted that it would pour with rain at lunchtime) we held off making a decision until lunchtime. We had light showers and sunshine but we went ahead anyway. We have a mixture of flat races for each class and team activities where each team is made up of children of all ages and the activities graded for the different age groups so everyone has a go until the whistle blows and you move onto the next activity with points being totalled to find out the winning team.  On the way home I always enjoy watching the changing palette of the wildflowers. Right now the Rosebay-willow-herb (fire weed) is blazing in great swathes alongside the roads while many of the other flowers have set seed and are more muted browns and golds. The broken telegraph pole has been repaired and more and more win...

It has been an fantastically beautiful day. The advantage of being in a hut at school is that we have windows on 2 sides and with doors at either end we were able to let the cooling breeze blow through the room. Uunfortunately it also set many papers flapping and clattering but it was worth it. As it was so warm and the weather is set to change soon, possibly tomorrow I rearranged my timetable so that we spent most of the day outside. A game of T-ball (simplified rounders/baseball), a story in the Secret Garden and time to explore the mini beasts there too. All evening this magnificent grey horse has been making silly noises as it his first time in this field. I went up to see what was going on and he looked positively gigantic beside the little Exmoor ponies. He came over and said hello to me making me miss my days of regular riding and teaching but even if my back wasn't dodgy it is very expensive to ride these days. I think it is about £40 for an hour's lesson now. I can rem...

Only 1 photo tonight as Blogger seems to be playing up. It has been a nice sunny day, perfect for our school Summer Fayre. We went along and I did my turn at manning the coconut shy stall. Everyone went away happy as they paid £1 and threw balls until a coconut fell (or was assisted) down. There weren't so many stalls this year but there were plenty of people around and they seemed to be enjoying themselves. I treated myself to an ice cream form the Hockins' van. They make real ice cream with cream and natural ingredients, not the fluffed up artificial stuff you normally get from an ice cream van. Before we went into town I did some proof reading and spell checking of reports as well as adding grades for effort, attainment and progress and managed to get half of them done. My next stressful event is being 'performance managed' on Thursday which includes a full lesson observation and an hour's discussion afterwards. It will be a big sigh of relief when that is over. ...

My whole blog just disappeared into the ether so here's a precis: sunny, teachers on strike, not me - can't afford to loose the pay. Rich privately educated government with personal fortunes, untouched generous pensions and fat consultancy fees to look forward to have decided to recoup some of the money lost by their banker pals by making public servants work until they are 68, pay more into their pensions and loose up to half the expected pension. Spent 5 hours sat at a PC in my classroom working on my reports. Nearly but not quite finished. Small cat spent day at vets being castrated. Happily playing at my feet now.

Lots of bright sunny spells today, warm in the sun but rather chilly when the clouds took over. The children were fairly quiet today after such an active time at the beach yesterday. In the afternoon it was the second of our shuffle-up days when my class went over to the junior school and I had next year's class for a relaxed afternoon of choosing activities and a bit of painting with watercolours. I will be teaching those children 1 or 2 afternoons each week (depending if it is week 1 or week 2), so it was good to have a chance to get to know them. The new cat is still very scared of the other cats who keep looking at him through the windows which sets him off into a panic. At the moment I am only letting Squeaky, who is the lowest ranking of our cats, stay in the house with him. There has been some growling and tail lashing and a few slashes with the claws as they approach each other but that is to be expected. I am now typing one-handed because one small loudly purring cat...

Although yesterday was the hottest day of the year (33C) in the south-east it was cooler here with rain in the afternoon and a little thunder in the evening. (Hence no Internet as everything was unplugged.) There were reports of strange tidal surges all around the south west including up some rivers. This is being put down to a mini tsunami caused not by an earthquake but by an undersea landslide off the continental shelf. Today we were back to sunny weather, perfect for our whole school trip to the beach. It was sunny but with a cooling breeze and we had a wonderful time. All except for a very unpleasant couple who own/rent the line of beach huts. We had put all our stuff down not close to but in front of these huts. First the man and then his partner came and very rudely demanded that we move away from the huts as we were costing them business. I tried to explain that we hadn't wanted to go much further down the beach as we had to walk back to the car park for the ...

Typical Glastonbury weather - pouring with rain, so for once I'm glad that I'm at home watching it on tv with the sound turned right up, and not trying to set up a tent on the mud. One day I'll get there. This year there are over 15,000 people there who are over 50 so it isn't just for the young. I was watching some interviews and one of the people interviewed was there for the first time .... and in her 70s. It's not on next year so maybe the year after. I won't even be going to the LLAMA festival this year. Last year there was an illegal rave and illegal camping at the same time as the festival. The local council tried to make the festival organisers responsible for this (it's a mainly free festival run by volunteers) even though the festival is estimated to bring in £9 million to the area with the result that the festival is off for this year. It was all fun and games in class today. As we are learning about Greece I thought I would be very up to da...

Great fun today in school as we spent the day marking the children's long writing task about Night and Day. Who would have thought that  'cif  orcs' was the latest way to spell Guy Fawkes ? or that firemen need to work at night to stop houses being blown up by 'torists' ? Plenty of laughter as sometimes even with 3 of us it was hard to interpret our children's spelling. Overall the levelling corresponded with our teacher assessment and the children have made good progress. It has been a dry day ending in sunshine so I had a pleasant stroll around the garden when I got home and then walked up to say hello to the ponies. I climbed up into the loft to bring down an amphora, possibly ancient but probably a modern repro to take into school for our Greek display. Just time for a bit of school work before I bottle the latest elderflower champagne and then off to bed.

I find it hard to equate the longest day of the year with the first day of summer but that is what it officially is here. Maybe we'll get some better weather now.We had a lot of rain in the morning but it cleared up the afternoon which was wonderful for me as I spent most of the time out of doors. It was the first of our shuffle up afternoons today and my class went off to spend the afternoon in their new classes in the junior school. The new teacher who will be teaching Year 2 next year came into my class to work with her future class for the afternoon. I then volunteered to work in the Year 1 class that I will be teaching several afternoons a week next year so that I could get to know them. My job was to mingle with the children doing 'outdoor learning activities' and make sure that they were able to take turns on the 4 colourful scooters. That meant a lot of cheery "Shall we let some one else have a go now because you've had a lovely long turn?" and similar...

It has been a wet, wet day. There were some dry spells as well and we managed to get the kids outside but now it is raining and looks set for the weekend. I got the PCs back working in my classroom, hooray! The remote IT people did something to the server to adjust the log-in details and now there isn't even a password, you just press enter to get in. And then in the afternoon, Sue, our school secretary (actually she's the school administrator) came and fiddled with my reluctant printer. She opened lids, shook anything that was loose and generally had an intuitive poke around and bingo! the machine now works. Mine was the 3rd one she fixed today. She doesn't claim to know about printers but she must have the magic touch. Half the class did their long writing task in the morning so we had Golden Time in the afternoon. It was quite pleasing to see that some of them chose to do more Greek based art from this week's topic work. Half of the children went out to do some garde...

At school the PC situation has worsened to the point where I can only laugh. The solution to my dead main PC is simply to replace it with a new one, fair enough by me. I got my interactive whiteboard up and running by plugging in my (work) laptop so at least I can access the Internet with the children though I don't have the interactive software on my laptop. My classroom printer was no better after a night's rest, (that sometimes works), the printer in another classroom wouldn't work and I even tried emailing my document to myself but that wouldn't open on the staffroom PC. I resorted to retyping my document in word and still the staffroom PC wouldn't print on either our super duper absolutely useless printer or through the photocopier. The school secretary got onto the company that looks after our server and the rest of the IT and they did something with the server. First all the icons on the children's PCs disappeared and now they can't be turned on at a...

I thought I was having a good day at school. Half my class had done their maths SATs in the morning and I was happily marking their papers when I was called back to my classroom. The main PC which runs the interactive white board was blank. Despite flicking of switches, twiddling and even replacement of cables it remains as dead as a dodo. The power supply has probably blown up. Then after school I was attempting to print some photos of my class dressed in a sheet and wearing the Grecian victor's wreaths that they had made. We have had trouble with all the printers recently. Sometimes they take up to 3 hours to churn out a print and I have to watch my printer like a hawk because if you do not remove the sheet of paper immediately it emerges it sometimes gets snatched back into the bowels of the beast and then jams the workings. I made the mistake of putting more paper in the tray and that stopped everything. I tried taking out the paper and putting less in, then just one sheet, the...

The fact that yesterday we had 1/3 of the average June rainfall for Devon in just 1 day had left the playing field too wet to use so our Sports Day had to be postponed. That was a shame as the sun was shining brightly this afternoon. If the weather stays fine we will attempt to have our Sports Day next Monday. Instead we had a day of normal lessons though some of my class felt they should have had choosing time instead. It was a little hard to teach today with my croaky voice, it's at times like these that you realise how much of a tool a teacher's voice is. I don't shout very much but a sharp tone can stop silly behaviour in an instant and a directed question can refocus wandering attention. I gave up by the end of the day and asked my teaching assistant to read the story, something I love doing, while I listened to children read. Back home those potato plants are coming on a treat. I've got too much school work to do to spend time working in the garden but I managed t...

It hasn't been a good day for my colleague. It started well with the Year 2 team (that's 3 of us) in the staff room marking SATs papers, chortling over mis-spelt words and amusing answers when my friend started to feel unwell. As she has a history of serious medical problems my other team member drove her to the nearby hospital where they decided to keep her in for tests and observations. I went to see her in the hospital straight after school where she was waiting in the MAU to find out if she had to stay in overnight for observation. Not a nice way for her to end the day. The day itself started with torrential rain outside while the news reporter on the TV talked of drought conditions in the east of the country. The day was mostly rainy which made the occasional sunny spell even more welcome. Gardening club, run by some parents, continued in the rain and I had to smile at a group of Year 1 children whose 'outdoor learning' seemed to consist of skipping in the biggest ...

A lot more sun today so when I got home I took the opportunity to mow all the grass. We have been promised a very wet weekend so it is good to get that job out of the way. The second half of my class did their reading SATs today and I have to say that I am very pleased with the standard of reading. There are a high proportion of children in both classes who are reading at about a year in advance of the average for their age. As many came into school with very low overall scores this is a good reflection of the way the school has encouraged reading and all literacy skills. The media keep on producing scare stories about how many children leave school unable to read  and this has simply not been my experience in this school, and we only go up to age 7. My next major gardening job is to tackle the weeds that are springing up between the flowers. The steep hillside will be covered in flowers for the next few weeks and it would be a shame to see too many weeds poking through. Every...

It was cold enough this morning to wear a jacket over my jumper but then we were lucky enough to have a hot and sunny day. Children and adults all seemed to be tired on this first day back at work. Too many late nights I expect. We are starting to prepare for Sports' Day which weather permitting, will be next Monday. Must practise the skipping-in-a-hoop race with my class. I took them all out on the junior school's big field in the afternoon to give them a chance to run some long races and so that I could separate them into fast & not so fast runners for the flat races. Or as I told them, the fast runners and the super-fast runners. Got to keep them motivated. I didn't manage to get away from school until 6.00 so when I got home there was just time to water all the seedlings and the hanging baskets before getting stuck into school work. I feel a bit like my boys as I now have my lap top set up beside my home PC so that I can work on reports while waiting for things to l...

Much sunnier today. My morning was spent at school on an inset day. We had to split into groups and come up with phrases to define our outstanding learning/teaching environment. All the things we would expect to see, hear & feel. I think it was to make it clear to everybody what our agreed expectations are which will be written up as policy documents. I managed to squeeze in some time in my classroom making a start on a new display for next half term's topic which in our class will be Greece. Plenty of scope to motivate the boys with Ancient Greeck legends and volcanoes. For modern Greece we will be tasting food, learning a little Greek and of course dancing and planning our own Olympics. I set our butterflies free, yesterday's wind would probably have pounded them against the nearest wall, and left the last few chrysalises in a sunny spot. Back home I spent some time out in the garden planting ..... canes, (they are nice long canes!) for the beans. At least it makes it lo...