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.

Wednesday 8 October 2014

Showers.

Getting up in the dark is so much better when there are waking birds to hear, bats to watch and a pretty pink sky to look forward to. Lots of sun and rain today.
It's been a long day at school, my reception class in the morning (I think all the trains are finally done), Year 1 classes in the afternoon and later a staff meeting about how to fill in the School Improvement Plan documents for our subject areas. Our head teacher brought us a tray of tasty sandwiches and savouries which had been left over from a meeting that she had been to in the afternoon. That helped us get through the dry subject of targets, outcomes and all the other things we have to put on those forms. 
I think I've finally cracked how to motivate my 2 classes of 5 year olds to get changed quickly and instead of 15-20 mins for all of them to get changed today one class did it 10 mins and the other in 8 mins. My method? Small square post-its which allow the child to put a marble in the class marble jar at the end of the day. For one class it was the first table to all be changed and ready for phonics and for the other it was the first 5 children who got the post-its. Hopefully they will be in be in an efficient routine by the time the headteacher comes to observe my phonics lesson in a month's time. Both classes have several children with erratic behaviour and though I have a teaching assistant in each class who will eventually take out the most needy child eg. when they are screaming or otherwise being disruptive that still leaves me with several others who need constant refocusing. So it's all a bit of a challenge.
Coming home it wasn't quite sunset but the looming thunderclouds made it look very dark.
Look! I have pumpkins. The 2 big ones actually came from the Co-Op which had a good deal of 2 pumpkins for £3. We only see pumpkins in the supermarket for a couple of weeks before Halloween and even then it's not many. There must have only been about 20 altogether and these were the biggest of the 'large' pumpkins. We don't celebrate Halloween but do like pumpkin soup. Every year the pumpkins are off the shelves before I get a chance to buy any so I thought I'd buy early this year. I would like to make pumpkin pie but the only recipes I've seen call for tinned pumpkin puree which is no doubt full of sugar  and unavailable anyway.  

2 comments:

happyone said...

You had me fooled there for a moment. : )
Everywhere you look here are pumpkins.
I like the pumpkins but could do without Halloween.

Ruta M. said...

Halloween is becoming popular here but I think that's because it is promoted by the stores. In London our church used to hold an All Saint's party for the children which was handy as it was also Romas' birthday.
Apart from specialist small growers there is only one farmer in the whole country which grows pumpkins for the commercial market. And I think almost none of those are actually eaten.