A Blank Canvas

We are two weeks away from finishing first term and there are still virtually no displays or student work up in my prac classroom. But do you what I'm thinking?

STAND BACK EVERY ONE! Miss D is taking over!

Here are some posters the kiddies made in 10 minutes. All to raise awareness on how we can stop bullying.

This last one was made by one of my boys who I am in awe of. Despite having a reputation as being one of "those boys" (behaviour management problems in terms of constantly disrupting), his strength is in his ability to clearly communicate his ideas. He speaks so well!! In case you cannot read it here, he says,

"This is a Yin-Yang sign. It means different. So let's take the meaning of this Yin-Yang sign - different - and make the world different. Stop bullying!!!!"

How cool that he thought outside the box.

So I had 5 minutes, before running to meet the supervising teacher at the staff meeting, to quickly put up the ones that were finished.

Must prettify the room! Lots more to come hopefully.

This just topped off my day. You know how the last couple lessons were not going so well with the class in terms of behaviour? Nope! Challenge overcome.

1) Continued with Whole Brain Teaching.
I asked the class whether they like it, or if they thought it was silly.
Insert loud, "YES! LOVE IT!"

2) Cup management
In my post last week, I mentioned that I planned to try Charity's at The Organised Classroom cup management strategy. Worked like a charm I'm guessing because I did not have to move it to red and only hovered  over a set of cups at a table, about to change it to yellow, once. Yes!!

3) Privileges
But I stole Miss Rowley's (at Peace, Love, and No. 2 Pencils idea of calling it Plan A and Plan B. Much cooler.

Plan A - stay in their groups and create a poster.
Plan B - assigned seating and writing paragraphs on how to stop bullying.

Miss Rowley is completing her internship and has amazing insights about her experience (along with awesome ideas that I'm stealing like the one here). I love following her blog as well as the other student teacher blogs because I relate to these ladies. In fact, I think we posted about wanting to improve our behaviour management techniques within hours of each other. Please pop by to say hello.


 

Tomorrow is my big day at Uni. 7am to 4pm. I have just remembered to strategically place my thermos on the kitchen bench so that when I wake up, stumbling, half asleep, I do not forget the most important thing of the day... coffee.

What would I do without coffee?!

Night all xx

P.S. I finished The Hunger Games on Tuesday night. Oh. My. Word. Mind-blowing. =D