Quiet Weekend

It's been a while since my last post. Last week, I felt worn out dealing with children who wouldn't listen and ended up yelling far more than was wise or necessary. I paid the price by not having any voice all weekend, and it's just been slowly returning this week. The upside of all this is that I couldn't teach and therefore have had a much more leisurely week thus far--it's felt like a four-day weekend. I watched three movies on the weekend and put together a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle. I've also done a lot more walking the last few days because I had the time to do so, as well as getting an acupuncture done today. Today I did go into school in the morning for a workshop on Big Writing (the new initiative recently adopted by Gasgcoigne to help lower-ability students--particularly boys--improve their writing) in the morning which was really good. The speaker was really engaging and gave us some good ideas (including how to teach children to count to ten in Japanese in three minutes or less). He talked about giving the kids nuggets of information to think about and gave us some ideas of the kinds of activities we can use to help them build meaning out of the information they're given. I expect to be back at school tomorrow, and hope to put into practice a few of the ideas he gave us today. I've talked to my mentor teacher and am hoping to get a bit more support--particularly for my guided reading program--soon. And I'm counting down the days until the half-term holiday and Belgium!