I'm still hanging in...

If anybody ever suggests working full time whilst trying to study full time, the only correct response should be to laugh. Don't do it! I've been doing it for nearly two weeks and I'm insanely tired. Still reasonably productive, but overwhelmingly tired. *sigh* Thank goodness for today's inter-school professional development day that allow the part of my brain necessary for monitoring and engaging with 27 children to switch off for a few hours! (Don't slam me: I fully intend to engage with the adults at the PD day... They just aren't as 'needy' as most kiddos!) Double bonus when I don't need to be there until 1.5hrs after I usually arrive at school! Anyway, I've been wanting to blog about some of the challenges and successes I've experienced since starting this contract but you know... Tired.

I thought, however, that I'd take a few minutes out of that extra 1.5hrs this morning to share a photo. It represents a big 'win' for me with this class. It's a super challenging class behaviourally and I spent a large part of the first week trying to establish a class culture that was safe enough to enable us to move forward into meaningful learning. It was hard. Very hard. Probably the hardest I've ever found a class, but you know me: it's my kinda class!  We've come a VERY long way in a VERY short time and I'm so proud of the progress we've all made. I'll share more about it later, when I'm not so tired, or feeling stressed about final essays, case studies and whatnot for uni.

NF Text Features Anchor Chart by Markeeta Roe is licensed under a
  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Based on a work here.

This week we've been reviewing non-fiction text features so that next week we can dive right into learning about top level text structures.  We're also learning about Ancient Greece so I've used a simple NF text about that as our 'mentor' text. After much discussion, a super simple anchor chart was created. There are no other student (or teacher) created anchor charts in the classroom, so I wasn't sure how this would be received. I shouldn't have worried: they LOVED it. Our next bite of the cherry saw every single student referring to it at least once, and many of them thanking me.  I love the way anchor charts reinforce learning and encoding. Yay!

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers:

Standard 1 Know the students and how they learn

Standard 2 Know the content and how to teach it

Standard 3 Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning

Standard 4 Create and maintain supportive and safe learning environments