Hi everyone,
Hope you all had a lovely midterm. I have spent some time over midterm planning for my own class. As you know I had an eventful start to the year and due to an injury was out of school for a while. So I am beginning the next half of term with my Senior Classes with gusto!
November can be a busy month. There is Science Week coming up and it’s also time to plan and begin a performance for Christmas. Some schools may also have Parent Teacher Meetings in November too. Mine are coming up soon.
For Science Week this year I applied to link with Royal College of Surgeons who had an outreach programme available. It centres around a day in the life of a cancer biologist and the children get to use a microscope and extract DNA from fruit and vegetables. I got the kit just before midterm and it looks great. I will add photos and more information before Science Week.
I have also applied for the RDS Primary Science Fair we took part last year too and the experience the class got was invaluable. They knew their project so well and were confident explaining it to the judges and other visitors to the stand. We have a new project this year that links with Space Week and Science Week so I am hoping we are successful with our application. If we are it will be a busy Science filled month.
I am also continuing Book Clubs with my class. The feedback from the children has been positive so far. I have my class divided into reading groups. And each group gets a book or sets of books to read. Some children explore a novel, while others might read from sets of ability level books such as Barrington Stoke or Tree Tops from Oxford Reading Tree. They have to complete activities in their Book Club Journal such as predictions, vocab work and book reviews. It also is a reading record that their parents must sign each night. It is a great way to encourage children to read books outside of their general interest area. At the end of the month the children have a book club meeting when they bring in home baking treats and discuss the book or reading challenge with their peers. They have focus questions to encourage discussion on the books and I pop to all groups to hear their views.
Finally I have signed up for Junior Entrepreneur with my class. So I am hoping to get a little bit started before Christmas. We took part last year and it was very successful within my class. The children really worked as a team and became very confident in leading their own business venture. I hope to blog regularly on our project this year.
If you have any questions on any mentioned in today’s blog post just send me a PM.
A.M.
Aistear Múinteoir 