A Fresh Start
So I’m getting to the end of my first half term holiday now and I’ve spent quite a lot of time in school during the break - it’s lovely and peaceful in there without the children!
I’ve made a lot of changes to the classroom and I’m not sure how well they’ll go down once the children start back on Monday. For a start I have put the tables back into groups for the whole class instead of having some of the children sitting at desks in rows. This may be ambitious at this stage but we’ll give it a go and see what happens. I think the children should be sitting and working in groups, and I’ve hated having them in rows, but if I have to go back to that then I will do, and I’ll make it clear to them from Monday that if this doesn’t work then that’s what I will be doing.
I have also cleared the carpet area again and we’ll see how we go having a carpet area back in the classroom. At the beginning of term it provided a nice space for them to rough and tumble in, but I’m hoping we’ve gone past that now. I know they can sit better on the carpet than they used to so again, we’ll give it a go. If they can’t do it then they’ll come in one morning and it will have disappeared again.
I’ve put loads of nice things up around the classroom as learning resources and made displays and things that I just didn’t have time to do during term time, so the classroom looks a lot better now, and the walls are full of things that could actually help them to learn, if they ever bother looking at any of them. Right now, as I type, I’m in the process of laminating my “word wall” which is made up of loads of laminated bricks, each with a high frequency word on. I found this wonderful resource, along with many others at Sparklebox, which I would highly recommend for lots of really useful free resource downloads. You can also download a file to edit the words on the bricks so you can make your own bricks of any words that aren’t already on there.
I’ve finally put desk tidies on each desk, actually trusting them to not mess with them constantly. I’m just of the mind at the moment to start treating them like juniors and expecting them to behave like that. It can’t get much worse than it was at the beginning of term so even if it gets really bad with the changes it’ll get better again as they get used to them. I know they’ll be terrible when they come back in on Monday, but I’ve managed to begin to tame them once, so hopefully this time will be a little easier. I’m going to set a class goal for behaviour every week, and assess it at the end of every week - I’ve downloaded some nice resources for that from Sparklebox too!
It’s a new half term and a fresh start, and I’m going to give them all a chance to impress me again and really make me proud of them this half term.