Welcome to family, friends and visitors. Here you will find interesting (hopefully) pictures of my part of the world, news of our household and probably, long ramblings about anything that catches my interest.

Friday 3 September 2010

Where Is My Fish Tank?

Finally my classroom is ready for the children - sort of. A peek inside my cupboard would reveal that after an initial clear out and tidy I ended up by dragging back in all the empty boxes and unsorted things to be dealt with later. As usual we find at the last moment there is a delay on a stock order and certain materials are in short supply. I had to resort to raiding around just to find coloured pencils for my new class as we don't know when the new stock will arrive. The laminator in the staff room has been burning hot (literally) as we are now encouraged to laminate every label and book cover that we make. I have been also been raging around the place looking for a plastic minibeast/fish tank that I know was in the science stock cupboard before the holidays. It has probably been thrown away in one of the grand clear outs that have been occurring recently which is quite annoying as I spent a lot of time a few years ago searching catalogues and the web for a decent straight sided tank with a secure ventilated lid. That way we could keep all sorts of minibeasts in the classroom without having them escape. I'm still going ahead with my plan to keep woodlice as part of my autumn display but it will be in a much smaller, scruffier open top tank. As science coordinator I'm going to try and get another one of those tanks asap because I know that I will use it at least.
The day has been absolutely glorious, very warm and sunny as I kept dashing across the playground from my class to the staffroom or the main building.

Being 'data' orientated I kept a pictorial record of the weather over the 'summer' holidays. It is rather noticeable that it has been wet and/or cloudy for most of the time. One sunny day at the start of the holidays, 2 in the middle and then the sun didn't show much until 2 days before the end of the holidays. This is why we Brits are forever concerned with the weather and fly off to warmer climes whenever possible. I've just decided that I'll use this chart idea in class and the children can fill in the weather each day. I like to do a lot of visual data handling using information that affects the children because checking if you've had your turn yet to hold Lovely Lion (a big soft toy) is really important and far more relevant than using some made up sets of data..

1 comment:

happyone said...

Wow, that's not many sunny days, but I'm sure it makes you appreciate them all the more. :-)