To celebrate the summer holidays and to celebrate my two years of blogging and to celebrate my 25 years in teaching and to celebrate my son’s Baccalauréat and to celebrate … well, any excuse is a good one really … I am going to be giving this blog a facelift, a makeover, a “relooking”. So watch this space to check it out over the next few weeks or so. I hope you will like my new swagger !!
In under two years, this blog has had over 20,000 hits. It is hard to believe and yet it is true. So thanks to everyone who has clicked here and here is to a continued future.
It has got to be today – that day that we hit 20,000 hits on my blog. Can you believe it ?
Over this weekend, I have been participating in the Virtual Round Table, a series of international on-line conferences about using technology to enhance our teaching. It has been a real thrill to exchange with like-minded souls from across the globe and I have connected with people from all sorts of places that I can hardly place on a map. It is so exciting to swap ideas and tips. It makes me realize how geeky I truly am becoming and it also reminded me of this photo I spotted on Twitter or somewhere similar over the past few days. So after my plethora of Georges, it is Geeksville International for a while.
This photo below will be featuring in one of my sequences starting when school returns. Will it be your class ???
Just for laughs, I have started a page of Howlers, the little gems that I have collected over the years of pupil creations, ways in which they use and abuse the dictionary for my linguistic delight. This page will be a work in progress.
To read some howlers, click HERE.
Today is the first day of my Easter holidays. Rarely have I waited so eagerly for the holidays to arrive. In the last couple of weeks of school, the kids were irritable, the staff were irritable and it was a generally grumpy atmosphere. But the magic of two weeks break from all of that will pour calming water onto many of those frayed nerves, leaving us refreshed and ready to start anew on May 5th. Lots to do between now and then – Easter eggs to organise, a garden to give some TLC to, some serious Spring cleaning to undertake and maybe a spot of painting – why not ? For Christmas, my lovely husband gave me a “pampering session” at our local beauty spa. I have been keeping it for a special moment – and that special moment has now come. Two o’clock this afternoon for a “Hawaian moment of relaxation” !!!
So forgive me if I take a break from my blogging too – those batteries defintely need a supercharge. The Easter bunny can take over for the time being !!
I really like this activity that I am going to talk about now, called “My Writing Jar”. It involves literally a jam jar, filled with random (or seemingly random) words. The students pick out a certain number per table and they have to make up a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, incorporating those words. It is such a simple idea but it works brilliantly every time. You can vary it by getting the pupils to add their own words to the jar, if you prefer.
I had heard people mentioning wordle in the past but never taken time to check it out. Here is my first wordle !! You paste text into a window and the gizmo creates a word cloud, or wordle, from your words. How thrilling is that !!
A colleague just shared on line a collation of useful websites and links. If you would like to take a look, you need to click HERE.
I recently read a blogpost about how the Work-Life balance should in fact be called the Life-Work balance. I thought a lot about that at the time and I remember that I actually switched off the computer and went to make chocolate brownies with my son instead of spending time reading blogposts ! Here is the photo we took to prove it.
A sharp reminder of how important it is to try to maintain a balance came this week when I learned that a dear colleague from one of my training courses had been a victim of a stroke in his classroom. The news is fairly positive and he appears to be slowly regaining use of his faculties, but what a wake up call !
Like many of us, and like my colleague, I often put my work before other things. How many cinema trips, football matches, films on the TV have I missed beause I have reports to finish, a presentation to tweak, books to mark ? I know that I am a perfectionist and just as I am very demanding of others, I am even more demanding of myself. But this weekend, as I think of my colleague and how things have just had to grind to a halt for him, whether he likes it or not, I think about how I must learn to re-assess too.
While I want my lessons to be as funky and as all-singing, all-dancing as possible, sometimes I just can’t. And while I want my training sessions to be 150%, sometimes they just can’t be. This morning I spent an hour making soup and a chicken pie for lunch. That should be normallity not exceptional. I actually really enjoyed it whereas generally I am not a keen cook. but the sheer normality of it felt relaxing and yet almost extravagant. Taking time out to relax is so important and yet, so hard to do a lot of the time.
A few weeks ago I did the Big Switch Off. I am not going to do that again tomorrow, but I am going to take the time out tomorrow to make a Sunday roast (roast beef and yorkshires any takers?) and to go and clear out the weeds in the front bed before they get out of hand – and to take the time to just enjoy my Sunday. Days off work are not just days given to us to catch up on what we didn’t have time to do in the week work-wise – and it is about time I started to believe that !! Anyone else feel the same ?
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