SCHOOL LIFE

I'm afraid that this must be a very short blog as I have been working all weekend (marking initial assessments, completing profiles, planning next week's lessons for a class with an extraordinary spread of levels hence huge differentiation required) and I have to be up at 0545 tomorrow to meet my new target of being in school by 7am.  If I am to do that then I must be in bed by 10pm - and that means just 15 minutes to blog!  Last week was a good week, but very hectic.  

Mr Ian and some of my Y5 class on their first day

At the moment it looks like my class will consist of 15 students, 9 boys and 6 girls, and has a spread from struggles with sentences and doesn't know any times tables, to very fluent and verging on GCSE maths!   And, as every teacher out there knows, that means two or three times the amount of work as I need to prepare at least three different sets of work.  Couple that with teaching a new year group in a brand new school, with a new Principal and it all leads to this being quite a busy term I fear!

Doreen, the Y4 TA on the left, and Beatrice my wonderful
Y5 TA on the right.  She is a real blessing and I will blog
more about her another time

Recognise anything here Kathy?
This is my behaviour monitoring system
- the idea stolen from Smallwood Y4 last year!

Sammy the maths badger has already been in action -
much to the shock of my African class!

On the positive side I seem to be getting on with my colleagues and have made quite a few good Christian friends.  The children are very easy to work with - they just need a bit of livening up I feel, but even after 3 days they are already starting to move to the rhythm of Mr Ian's slightly unusual style in the classroom!  I have also really fallen on my feet with church and I am loving the services in the Cathedral - my perfect mix of traditional teaching and format, coupled with some amazing worship.  I will do a whole session on church next week or the week after.  I have decided just to randomly spread a few pictures of the first couple of days at school throughout the text to bring it to life - remember you can click on them to make them bigger.

My very bare classroom on day one.  Hopefully it will start to come
 to life over the next few weeks - provided I get some more boards.
We are not allowed to stick anything to the walls!

Ronnie is now back in Juba and is also discovering that her job is a little more challenging than she might at first have thought.  However, she is tackling it with her usual no-nonsense approach and will, I'm sure, soon have the whole South Sudan contretemps sorted out.

Ronnie's front door ,including guard - she assures me he
just happened to be there and actually guards the whole
compound not just her house.

Random bed-maker in Juba.  One of the few pictures
to make it out of South Sudan recently.

Okay, 5 minutes before the deadline so I must go.  My apologies to everyone who has sent me such interesting and chatty emails - I will reply properly when life settles down, but for now this will have to do.