Santa's Flying Visit.

It was much warmer today but the clouds were so low that when I dropped Romas off at The Ariel the top of the radio transmitter was lost in the clouds. I dropped more stuff off at the dump and then shopped at Tescos. By visiting several supermarkets each week in the course of my travels, I'm able to take advantage of the different bargains in each. Tescos has some excellent own brand value basics especially tinned vegetables and chocolate. Somerfields reduces perishables by up to 75% after 4.30, Lidll's has good value continental meat, fish, cheese, chocolate and other items  and Brian Fords as well as excellent local meat, fruit and veg has short coded items and end of lines, you never know what will be there.

Back to school for an afternoon in the Reception class. First the children were treated to a visit from Santa in the coastguard's helicopter based at Chivenor. He flies by all the local schools each year and it is lovely to watch the children's faces, (I've decided that I shouldn't show the faces of the children I teach, misuse of my position.) There was lots of enthusiastic waving and a few questions afterwards asking where the reindeer were. Resting of course.

Bye bye Santa.

There was a lovely moment in class this afternoon.  One boy while colouring, started to sing one of the carols that they had learnt (Mary, Mary, rise up and cease your praying). Soon all 15 of the children in my area were singing away at the top of their voices for about 10 minutes on and off. I was doing phonic testing with individual children and all I did was to remind the children to use their singing voices and not their shouting voices. There are a lot of confident singers in the class and we often sing and sign the register . There is one little girl with Downs Syndrome and she joins in with the singing and another little girl with Kabuki Syndrome shows her enjoyment by clapping in time. The other children encourage them by singing along and will even help them sign ( we use makaton) but there is one girl who simply refuses to answer the register in any way. It is elective rather than selective mutism, she is happy to join in sound and word work and in fact shouts louder than any one else, she volunteers to read words or sounds on her own and will answer questions or tell her news to the class quite happily. It's just a big block over acknowledging the register. We're all racking our brains how to get round this. At the moment we don't make an issue and move on to the next child. 

I've given up trying to use Opera, java conflicts or something were making it awkward to write my blog. Now at the behest of the IT men in the family I'm trying Google Chrome, so far so good.