Messy.

My first thought as I got up for another early start was " at least I don't have to do this tomorrow". It's been another grey day and as the storm that dropped all the snow on The States approaches us things have got considerably wetter. It was so wet that for once I didn't take my class out for either morning or afternoon play though luckily things had calmed down enough at lunchtime for the children to have a run around. Because of that and the fact that the children couldn't go and do any of the outside activities during the day things were fairly lively in class.

The photo above was taken yesterday. I posted it on Facebook to tease the class teacher who apart from being fantastically organised, which makes my life easy, also likes everything to be very tidy. I've known her since she started teaching and it's something we joke about together. She often asks me to do the more messy art activities as I'm quite happy with mess. Needless to say everything was tidied up by the end of the day. 

Today I replenished the bag of junk materials so the children could build more castles, part of their current topic. However there were a group of boys who had discovered the therapeutic effect of cutting everything and anything into tiny pieces. Not only that but I looked up from the table where I was working with some children on teen numbers to see a veritable drift of polystyrene bubbles rolling across the floor in the draft. The boys had found some packaging inside a cardboard box and were crumbling and cutting it down to  bubble size. Then there was some cotton wool which had been pulled into individual strands, lots of them. It was looking bad even to my eyes. I didn't stop to take a photo but abandoned my maths children to get a major tidy up started. No more junk modelling for the rest of the day. Having satsumas for fruit time added to the grubby state of the floor as though each child peeled their satsuma into a paper towel small pieces escaped on the way to the bin. 

The storm was in full force as the parents came to collect their children at the end of the day. I stayed behind to write up my assessment notes for the class teacher. A quick diversion to the garage to fill up with petrol as I don't trust the fuel gauge in my car and then home in the gathering gloom and rain.