PE Pandemonium.

The sky was very grey as I drove into school and and although the rain held off and it was quite warm the sun never really came out. The weather forecast for tomorrow is for northerly winds and much lower temperatures. Snow is forecast for Scotland but we should be ok here. We always have to be careful because wet weather and low temperatures mean that we can be trapped in our valley by black ice while 6 miles away in Barnstaple there is hardly a frost. It would be a little difficult to explain why I couldn't get to work. If we think this is going to happen we leave the cars in a gateway nearer to the top of the hill. As I drove home I thought I would wait and see if the grey clouds developed into an interesting sunset but this little patch of sun was the best that I could see, until I turned around and saw lovely pink and blue clouds behind me. By the time I got to a gateway that gave me a decent sky view the colour was fading. It is very hard to pick up subtle sky colours. I spent a long time varying the shutter speed and aperture at home trying to catch the deep pinky-orange clouds but I wasn't happy with any of my photos. I'll just have to keep on experimenting.

I had such a funny pe lesson with my class this afternoon. Well it would have been funny to anyone watching. The class teacher had asked me to teach the children some of the games we learnt in our pe session on Monday. All went reasonably well until I decided to show them how to play LaDiDa.The aim is to sit in a circle with everybody holding a beanbag or small object in the right hand. Then chanting LaDiDa several times you hold the beanbag infront of the person on your left, then on the right and several times back and forth until dropping the beanbag in front of the person on your right on the final Da. You all then pick up the beanbag that your neighbour has placed in front of you and start again. I knew it wasn't going to be that easy to teach this game but we came to grief first when I asked them to sit down in groups of 6. I always like to get children as independent as possible and not have them waiting for me to allocate each child to a team. Next hurdle- I asked for 1 person from each team to stand up, this really showed who could work as a team. Even when all the other teams had got their beanbags one team had 3 children standing up, each of whom was determined they were going to be the one standing up . They kept looking to me to sort them out but I left them to solve the problem while I started the other groups, eventually they did though then they couldn't sit in a circle. I stood there and asked them to make a circle around my feet- so they sat in a line! I won't even try to describe the mayhem when we tried to play the game. Eventually after getting them all to sit in a big circle and doing it in slow motion most of the children got the idea but when they went back into their groups a number of them didn't want to let anyone else have 'their' bean bag and kept trying to take them back. At that point we ran out of time. I 'm sure they'll be able to play it , one day!