A New School Year Begins.

The morning's rain seemed suitable for the first day of autumn and the first day back at school. Luckily it was a non-pupil day to ease us back into work mode. By general request the 'sit in a circle and say what you did in the holidays' activity had been removed from the day's programme but instead we were faced with a different exercise. On the spur of the moment we all had to talk about, in terms of teaching and school, something we were proud of and something we were looking forward to. Quick turning of cogs in the head to come up with something that was appropriate and 'worthy'. Apart from that and a refresher on how to deal with the child that has diabetes, my day was spent chatting with the friends that I will be working with and helping to get a classroom ready for the children who start their school year on Wednesday. For me that involved lots of cutting out and trimming of laminated labels/pictures and making a start on sorting out the children's reading books. There was also a lot of discussion of the ways that we are going to handle the children with particular behaviour difficulties. There needs to be consistency in how all the different adults in the classroom respond to each child. Most of those children find changes very difficult to handle so it will be hard enough for them moving up to a new classroom. Although they will have the same teachers as last year the 2 classes have been shuffled around so there will be a different mix of  children in the classroom.

It stopped raining in the afternoon and coming home at 4.30 there was a lot of blue sky around. I decided to spend the whole day in school today and then not go in tomorrow, also a non-pupil day, which  is more than equivalent to the 2 afternoons I am paid for.

Once home I rushed in to get change back into shorts and t-shirt so that I could spend some time sitting out in the sun. I did that for a while but it started to get chilly so I retired indoors.