The Destitute Teacher

Yay! I love Fathers Day! Another occasion to get out the crafty materials and create cutesy little crafts with my little lovelies. I'm probably going to repeat myself endlessly here, but.... there is a BIG place for crafts in the classroom. Cutting and sticking skills are pretty shocking these days (yes, I am old), even in my nine year old students. Pride in presentation is also something that is often lacking, and little craft projects are just PERFECT for this! For Fathers Day this year, we followed the crafty theme of popsicle stick photo frames (as seen on Mothers Day). This time the frame said "My Dad is a star", rather than the jigsaw decorations. I set my Fathers Day gear up with three tasks... a card, a 'greatest dad in the world' certificate, and the craft table. The craft is a compulsory activity, while the other two are optional. However, there is the expectation that the children will spend the entire lesson MAKING, rather than talking or mucking aro...

Its been a while since I last updated this blog, so I am going to do a bit of an 'idea vomit', as I have been stockpiling ideas and just haven't gotten around to getting them up online lately. In Math we have been looking at place value a fair bit lately, developing their number knowledge. We have been using a lot of concrete materials- beans, iceblock sticks, unifix cubes, money etc. I am now trying to link the more abstract with the concrete- using place value 'house charts', where the children need to image the materials and quickly tell me how many tens/ones are in a number. Quite frankly, my slow brain does not generate numbers fast enough. The poor thing finds it hard enough to make my body breathe, talk and eat, without generating random numbers for the children to computate. After a while I realised I was using the same digits over and over, and completely forgetting digits like '7'. Poor 7. In the interest of using completely random two digit num...