Arctic Adventures

When Winter hit, it was only appropriate to start a chilly theme like Arctic Adventures.

I enjoyed the classroom decorations for this theme. I even bought a sneaky pair of cute classroom slippers to wear, when appropriate of course.

Castles and Crowns

We moved from Africa onto Castles and Crowns in our second term together. I didn't get many photos of the setup but I did manage to find a photo of the role play area with a little banquet table and dress ups.

My favourite part of this unit was most definitely our school trip to Windsor Castle. My teaching partner and I put together a letter from 'Windsor Castle' inviting the children to enter a competition to 'win a trip' to the castle. Now, we knew we would going on the trip regardless but they didn't and you should have heard the screams of joy when we 'received' the letter below telling us we had 'won'.

It was such a beautiful place to visit. We got to walk through the state apartments and see the grand rooms all set up. The children were in awe and it is by far one of the coolest trips I have been on with a class.

Teaching in the UK

Well it has been a minute, hasn't it? Almost 3 years actually. I took a leap back in 2018 and moved my life over to the UK to teach for 2 years. It was an amazing adventure and one I will never forget.
I had the privilege of working at two primary schools in England - one in London and one about 2 hours north of London. I had two very different experiences but learnt a lot from both. I'm going to make a few posts here about some things I did in the classroom.
In the UK their school year begins in September and goes through to July and they have 3 school terms throughout the year. My favourite part was the half term break. Every 6ish weeks everyone would get a 1 week break. Then at full terms we would get 2 weeks off. It broke the terms up and everyone appreciated it! I'm not sure how I'll go getting used to 9-13 weeks straight now that I'm back in Australia.
My first full term we had an African theme and all our learning was centred around this. We created our learning space to reflect the theme and to engage the children from the first day they stepped into the classroom.

As our 'stunning start' the children walked into the classroom to discover a cheeky monkey had broken in and would not climb down from the hanging wires.

The children had to find a way to convince the monkey to come down so that we could learn more about him and where he came from.

Some tried to coax him down with bananas and others thought he may be stuck so attempted to build ladders to help him down.

'Please monkey come down or I'll give you 1 banana.'

Eventually he climbed down and told us he was from Africa, lost and missed his family very much. We had to investigate monkeys and apes to find out what he was and help him get home.