The Destitute Teacher

I love celebrating Easter with my little darlings! Normally Easter heralds the beginning of the school holidays here in NZ, however this year we are starting with a 12 week term, so we qualify for an Easter break! This year I am teaching year twos, so we did the usual routine on the Thursday before Easter.... Easter poems, Easter Math games (into their group boxes), Easter baskets and some Easter printables which were available as a fast finisher activity (dot to dots, spot the differences, find a word and an Easter themed boggle). Our boggle activity was vastly popular, as the prize offered up was some glittery eggs and little fluffy chicks (both available from Spotlight). I buy them after Easter each year, when then are marked down to ridiculously cheap prices and pop them in my cupboard for the following Easter. This year I made my class an Easter themed bean bag throw activity for Math. It began with 10 circular bean bags, decorated to look like bunnies (inspired by this blog h...

Although this post is has "St Patricks Day" in the title, the content is totally adaptable to any themed holiday or occasion- as you will soon see! In NZ, Valentines Day occurs fairly quick into the school year. I usually take the opportunity to pop some Valentines themed board games into the Math group boxes for the children to play as part of their rotation tasks. Last year I made up a set of 'tic tac toe' for each group box. The sets had a coloured game board (glued onto card) and 6 felt hearts of one colour, 6 of another colour. I am slightly embarrassed to admit that I forgot about the games, and they were in the group boxes for the entire year. However, am excited that every set survived! I credit it to the fact that each heart was a double layer of felt blanket stitched together- very durable. However, this year I was less organised and just cut out single layered felt hearts. My plan is to stitch them together before next Valentines Day. No doubt it w...

Easter is really really close now and I am getting extremely excited. It could be the crazy sugar highs that are hitting me in that direction, but I think that it is mainly the Easter sales that I get excited about (and the copious amounts of chocolate, but that is another blog altogether). Last year in the Easter sales I picked up an Easter egg mould for $1 from Spotlight. Totally exciting, this bad boy means I can mould 12 (half) eggs at a time. So as we approached Easter this year I started wracking my brain for a little moulded craft idea for my class to complete. I came up with Easter plaster of paris magnets.   Having only one mould and 25 students, I decided that I would mould and dry the eggs myself. This turns the activity into a definite craft rather than art activity, but was very managable and easy to complete in a short space of time. I also wanted the magnets to be an Easter gift to my students, rather than several weeks of tedious work. I made up 31 eggs, which ga...