Last week was the final week before our 2 week holiday (yippy!). On Wednesday all the grade 1 and reception classes went apple picking. We collected apples off the ground and then went back to the farm to watch them be made into apple juice. It was so delicious I came home with 2 litres of it :) The kids also loved the trip and getting to collect apples from the field.
Thursday was our sports day. We spent the morning doing sports day stations, and then the afternoon in a grade 1 football (soccer) tournament. Also a great day. The only tricky part was keeping the kids entertained while waiting in between football games. Well, myself too - at one point I ended up doing cartwheels with a bunch of my girls. They were pretty easy to keep occupied. At one point we just ran a lap all the way around the track and they loved it!
Friday we had a pro-d day. We were all at the city campus, and afterwards I just stayed in the city. We went out for a drink to celebrate, then hung around with Claire and her boyfriend before going for dinner together. I stayed at Claire's house that night, and went to brunch with them the next day. Claire and I then met up with Marcus (and later another teacher and her husband) to go to the book fair.
So I spent all afternoon Saturday and then again Sunday morning at the Frankfurt book fair. This is the largest book fair in the world and is absolutely amazing!! It started last Monday, and opens up to the public on the weekend. On Saturday we went around a bunch of the halls having a look at all the different things that are there. The real purpose though was to scout out deals and free books for Sunday. Being the last day of the fair, a lot of the publishers sell or give away their books on Sunday. We hit the jackpot with Scholastic! They were just putting their books out on tables for anyone to take. When they found out we were teachers they kept bringing us resources or good books. It was so nice of them, and we got so lucky!
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| The Scholastic booth in the international publishers hall |
Today at school we unpacked all the books we got and sorted them. We took some for our classrooms and then the rest will go into the library. We also counted up the retail price of all the books - almost €3000! And that didn't include the books we bought or got free for ourselves. Definitely going to this fair next year!!
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| Claire and I with our free books :) |
On Sunday I had to leave the book fair earlier than the others to go over to my year end softball barbecue. We did some cleaning of the containers and dugouts, then had a barbecue. Unfortunately just as we started to eat it started to pour. So we stood around in the rain or inside the container enjoying the afternoon. It was nice to see some of the people and just chat - definitely looking forward to winter training and having that outside of school again.
Today, being my first day of holiday, I did the obvious thing: went into school. I am starting teaching phonics after the break, so needed to go in and get some new displays up. Plus exciting things like rearranging my classroom and getting ahead on some other work. Claire and Marcus were also there, so it was still an enjoyable day. We went out for dinner at the end of the day too.
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| Overall view of the room. I moved the tables around and made two new displays: Sounds We Know and Owl art Work |
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| Back of the room with my new carpet area |
I bought one of those carpets with roads on it for the kids to play cars on. I will also use it for a guided reading space. I need to change the displays on the bulletin boards when I get back, but that will wait a little while until we've started our new topics. We are going to start learning to read so the Reading Corner one will become some sort of reading display. Need to get creative! Or just talk to my English colleagues - displays seem to be pretty important in England.
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| The front corner |
The Sounds We Know display will have the jolly phonics cards on it. The birthday calendar will be moved and redone, to be replaced soon by a word wall (complete with owl letter cards). One of my students was in the holiday camps, and came in as I was putting all the numbers in the 100s chart. It was so cute, because he got so excited about it! He went up to my TA and kept going on about the 100s chart :)
Tomorrow I promise I am not going to school again. Hopefully going to meet Kathrin's new baby :) Then on Wednesday meeting with Cara to plan our trip to Spain!
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