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...

My current school recognises ANZAC Day (Remembrance Day) every year with a whole school assembly as close to the 25th of April as we can. The local RSA members come along and each class lays a 'wreath' dedicated to our fallen soldiers. The whole effect is just beautiful, and every year I am blown away by the variety of crafts each class presents. This year we worked with our buddy class to create some layered fabric poppies. I got the inspiration from this site here . Originally I had high ambitions and wanted the children to sew layers of eco-cloth together to create the poppies. My hopes were quickly dashed, and we resorted to hot glue gunning the layers together. Nice and fast and probably more effective... most sewn efforts were a disaster. We keep our hot glue guns on plastic plates. The plates catch the drips and when the children glue the gun to the plate, it easily peels back off again. The class then brainstormed how we wanted to present our poppies. We chose to g...

I am slowly working my way through a massive backlog of posts that I have photographed and never done anything with.... Last year I made myself a vow that I would try and MAKE each of my students a little Christmas gift for them each at the end of the year. After much to-ing and fro-ing, I decided on CROCHET gifts, as there had been a wooly theme in the classroom. I found a super cute and super easy pattern for crochet monsters here . They work up quickly and it was a relatively painless process to make 21 of the little darlings. I started during the Term 3 holidays and gradually picked at the project. These little monsters were packaged up with a 3B1 notebook (which I bulk buy in the stationery sales at the start of the year... 5 cents each!), a pencil, and an eraser. The kids loved receiving them almost as much as I loved making and giving them. I also put together a simple theme for the chocolate gifts I gave to teacher aides, co-workers etc.... brown paper, twine and a little c...

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...

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...