My Holiday Starts.

There was a lot more blue in the sky today. When the sun finally made it over the hill we had a few spot lit  corners in the garden.

Today was my last day of school before the Christmas holidays. School doesn't finish until Friday but I'm starting my holiday now. At lunchtime we exchanged our Secret Santa gifts and said goodbye to one of the teaching assistants who is retiring. As we've already had 4 special birthdays and a baby shower this term we didn't bring food for a buffet lunch. We had fun opening our presents, some were a bit saucy which gave us a good laugh and on the whole everyone looked happy. I got some incense sticks and a Christmas themed ceramic salt and pepper set.

Back in class with the Reception children we skipped phonics and instead had a long PE lesson in the hall. After that we went straight out into the playground where I gave the children white chalk (left over in my bag from something I did with the Year 2 children) and let them draw or write on the playground. My only instruction was that they could only draw on the ground. They had such a lot of fun. Some wrote their names or numbers but most of them just had fun drawing. We stayed outside until the other children came out for playtime and I shared out the remaining chalk to any that wanted. I had children coming up to me sadly with a stub of chalk saying their chalk had 'run out'.

Yesterday I read a story to the children about 'When I grow up.' and I told the children that when I was their age I wanted to be a carpenter. When I asked the children if they knew what a carpenter was before the girl whose Dad is a carpenter had the correct answer I was told that a carpenter was .... a man who fixes cars or .... a man who puts carpets in your house. Not bad guesses I suppose.

After school I went over to Asda. Not much in the way of bargains but I did get a jar of plain minced garlic. Tesco's used to sell it but for the last few months they've only had the garlic with ginger which isn't always the right thing.