The Destitute Teacher

I love celebrating Christmas with my class, and last year was the first year in a while that I had a whole class who celebrate Christmas too! In the term three school holidays I put together a Christmas kit of activities that I could whip out in the last week of school... and I was so glad that I did! The students loved the new activities and were highly engaged in them- surprising as the end of the year can be so rough on tempers.  It also meant that I could work through the classroom and pack away our usual classroom resources/ activities for the end of the year. The extra time to do this was invaluable! In the kit was a couple of activities I would put out before school/ Discovery time or throughout the day, a set of Literacy based activities and a set of Maths activities. This post focusses on the before school activities... below are links to all the resources! I wish I could find my photos, but I will try take some more for you. I've tried to keep costs to a minimum but I did...

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...