What I have to show for nine weeks for being a New Entrant teacher.

Last Saturday I went to school and put up the last of the children's artwork that I had not yet had a chance to put up.  Sounds strange.... with it being the last week of school and all.... but I only had this class for nine weeks and I wanted to see eight weeks of work on full display before I took it all down in Week 9 to send it home and turn the children's bedrooms into mini art galleries.

Firstly, standing at my desk, I did a panoramic shot of my class.  I had also scrubbed the tables clean of PVA glue, so they are gleaming.

B is for bear and B is for bee.  I'm so proud of the work we did in the first week.

D is for dinosaur.  I got this off Pinterest and was a good one for following instructions and getting things glued on accurately.  Originally we were going to do dragons... but then my cousin, Susan, a long time NE teacher and now RTLit said (after I had done S) not to focus on words that start with blends.

D is for dabbing dots on d.  Another inspired by Pinterest and it got the children using a paint brush in a different way.

N is for numbers.  Another simple idea I got from Pinterest.  It also helps children put numbers in order and practice their gluing skills.  While the examples I saw on Pinterest used capital letters, I focused on teaching the students lower case letters.

T is for turkey.  Again this was an activity to teach the children gluing on and spacial awareness.  T is for tree.  It is important to give the students the opportunity to draw what they see for themselves.  T is for taniwha.  T is for tui.  For these two communal activities we were learning to "colour inside the fence" with crayons and then use long brush strokes to dye the picture.  Some students needed to be taught how to not keep stroking in the same place.

T is for tiger.  We made the tigers from paper plates and I got them to paint both sides as I envisaged them hanging.  We looked at a picture of a tiger when we put it all together and used white crayon before we glued on the black stripes.  We used white wool for the whiskers.

S is for snake.  We started off with the ideas of putting a pattern on the snake.... but these kids weren't very good at colouring patterns that repeat with crayon.... it was a bit above them.  And then we used dye.  I cut out the snakes and glued them on coloured paper and cut them out again.  Then I cut different coloured shapes and after we had done some patterning with beads on thread, and other materials, the children had more of an idea on patterning and were able to make a two colour/shape pattern and glue it on the back of their snake.

S is for sheep.  An idea inspired by a former colleague in 2014, Kimberley, when she was a BT.  Finally found an opportunity to use it.  Two learnings from this: don't make your sheep so big because you use so many cotton wool balls; this would be a better activity when teaching blends - sh.  Thanks for that tip Susan!

S is for strawberry.  We looked at and discussed the strawberries before we drew the strawberries and then we ate them.  Again, this would be a better activity for str.  S is for sweetcorn.  I bought the sweetcorn for our class garden.  We discussed what it looked like and then we drew it.  Again... sw probably would be best for this activity.

This is an idea I got off Pinterest in 2014.  So I made it for my new class in term three 2014.  I did not use all of the cards this time.  I went for a few to keep it simple.

A is for ambulance.  We were visiting by Daniel from St Johns in Week 1 and the following week we were doing the letter A, the short one.  A is for apple  So I made a study of apples.  I purchased five different varieties of apple for us to discuss, examine, draw and colour.  I love their apples.  Then I had also found an awsome apple in an a activity on Pinterest.

G is for garden.  For this one I wanted to introduce the children to using scissors themselves.  So I drew a whole pile of flowers in pencil, gave one of each colour to the students and asked them to cut it out.  I cut out the yellow centre, stalks and leaves, but this gave the flowers a more individual look.  I first got them to draw a flower garden on blue paper using crayon to give this depth.  Then we glued the flowers over the top.

G is for goose.  Another cool as idea I got off Pinterest.... but I was up to after 2:00am cutting out 144 feathers and sorting them into twelve individual snaplock bags so each child would have a variety of colours.  My original intent was to also discuss the various textures of the paper.  But we had some difficulty doing this as two of my special needs students were somewhat distracting.  As you can see we had a variety of individuality in how the feathers were stuck on.

M is for mouse.  Another inspired by Pinterest and getting the students to glue on and be aware of space.  The original Pin uses a capital M so I adapted it to a lower case m.

 N is for nest.  This inspiration came from a staffroom discussion.  So I found some simple birds on Google images, printed them out, gave the children water colour paints to paint their birds and then we went off looking for things in the school grounds to make nests with.  A bit of PVA glue and waahlaa, we have a nest for our birds.

This was delightful to see as we went off to collect nest materials....

D is for dog.  This was our Art & Craft day focus.  We put together all the skills we had been learning for the term:  crayon and dye, long brush strokes for both paint and dye, gluing on, cutting out (they cut out their spots for their dogs).

M is for me.  On the first day of school for the term, I tried to get them to draw a picture of themselves in crayon.  It was a failure.  But later in the term I decided to try again.  So here they are in crayon with dye.

M is for monster.  This activity was all about getting the children to cut out their own shapes.  I was trying to teach them some tricks like folding the paper in half and how to draw the shape before cutting.  I also was trying to teach them how to hold the big side and cut off the small side.  All those things we take for granted when cutting.

L is for lemon.  We had already drank lemonade and sucked on lollipops, so I brought in a lemon off our tree and we looked at it and discussed it before cutting it in half, sniffing it and drawing it.  Later I squeezed it out and we tasted the juice.  Lots of good oral language and very impressive detail of the features of the lemon.

P is for pig.  Paper plates were my inspiration for this.  We painted our pigs pink.  I cut out ears and noses for them to paint too.  We glued on the ears and under the nose is a thick piece of corrogated cardboard to make the nose "stand out" from the face.  White and brown circles for the eyes along with black buttons, and the nose is finished off with two pink buttons for the nostrils.

This is the teachery stuff at the front of the classroom: thinking hats, months of the year and days of the week, colours, visual timetable, the calendar, number of the day and all that.

We made a Christmas tree.

These were our Super Acts of Kindness.  On the last day we took them all down, sorted them and sent them home.

These are the toys I purchased for the play based aspect of my class....

And from the outside of my class, I photographed the plants we have grown this term for the children to take home.  We grew a sunflower plant each and the seed tray has four pea plants and a basil and corriander plant.... that's if all the seeds germinated!

We took regular photos to record the growth of our plants.

This is our class garden.  We planted a tomato plant, marigolds, basil, peas and sweetcorn.  The mint and gladiolus were already in place.

I am so proud of what we achieved in our short time together.  I learnt a lot.  I hope they learned a lot too!!

Teaching New Entrants: Focusing in on a letter

I usually have a lot of balls in the air when I am teaching my normal age range.  It's all part of keeping everyone engaged.

With new entrants, they do not have a terribly long attention span.  Some of our projects are things we complete in one session, and some, I am teaching them, you have to revisit.

Because I only have these students for nine short weeks, rather than doing Letter of the Week, we will make a letter last two to four days depending on the activities I come up with.  We have an Art Week coming up, so I am also using these activities as an opportunity to teach the children some skills:

• how to spread glue to stick something down
• how to use brush strokes for paint and dye
• spatial awareness
• critical viewing
• observational drawing
• colouring in within the lines
• printing

And I find that you need to do these skills over a variety of different projects so the students get the opportunity to repeat the skill and apply it to different activities.

I've been collecting ideas for working with NEs for a while.  And after I secured this position, it went into overdrive.  So I have three Boards on Pinterest that most of my ideas are coming from:

• New Entrants
• Invitation to Create
• Arts & Crafts

The first letter we focused on was the letter B.  I decided we would start off by using coloured paper and glue to construct a bear head.  So I had a look on Google images for a bear head to use as inspiration.

Visit this website for this and more bear clipart:  http://clipart-library.com/free-bear-pictures.html 

I then cut out a head, ears, a muzzle, nose, eyes, pupils and patches for the ears.  We used PVA glue to glue the bears to coloured paper.  I wanted the children to use fingers to apply the PVA to teach them that brushes were not used for gluing - it wrecks brushes and makes them no good for painting.  When they were dry, I showed the children how to draw the mouth on to the muzzle.

We also went outside to blow bubbles as part of our B focus.  I took lots of photos and the children told me their stories to go with a photo of them.  These photos and stories are in our Letter Book.

This is our letter book.  We brainstorm the focus letter words and I type them up and add corresponding pictures.  We also have a poem (thanks Pinterest) that goes with the focus word.

Next we made the bees.  I cut out a bee body and the children glued on the stripes and eyes.  We let them dry.

When we came back to them we glued on the legs, antennae and proboscis, which took two goes and we weren't successful with PVA so had to use the hot glue guns.

Then I made a flower for our bees.  I cut the centre and petals out from scrapbooking paper.  I stuck them with blutack to the cupboard doors.

Sheryl, in the class next door, suggested using handprints to make the frilly bits of the flower.  So I mixed up some pink paint and painted each child's hand to make three prints each.  We did this one child at a time.  Of course, it also brought up some good oral language as we did this.  We talked about how the paint felt cold, the brush tickled and how to place the hand.

A parent cut out all the handprints for me and I was able to blutack the hands to the flow on the cupboard.  The children and I had also hot glued on the wings, made of golden cellophane, to the bees.  I then added the bees to the flower with blutack too.

And this is how the cupboard came up with our bees flying around the flower.  You can also see a copy of the letter B brainstorm we did.  There is a larger copy in our Letter Book.

And this is our B corner! I love how colourful it all is.

Next we did the letter A.  We had already learned about ambulances, thanks to Daniel the paramedic who taught the kids about how to call 111 in an emergency and what an ambulance and paramedics do.  So we had that nailed.

We brainstormed a whole lot of short A words and I typed them up and add pictures to go in our letter book.  We also have a poem (thank Pinterest) to go with it.  The kids are loving this.

I bought five different variety of apples.  We looked at the apples.  We discussed the apples.

We then drew the apples with pencil and coloured them in with crayons.

Then we made apples (thanks Pinterest) with coloured paper and PVA - yes, I prepared everything first.  I also do the activity with the students so they have a model to follow.

I've since mounted these artworks and put them on the wall.

Our next focus letter is the letter T.  Once again Pinterest provided some inspiration and we made turkeys.  I pre-cut out all the necessary parts and demonstrated how to make the turkeys.  As you can see, we had varying success or individuality.

I tweeted this picture out, and then someone tweeted back: taniwha, tui, tiki, tuatara!!!

Well we couldn't do all of them but we did do this:

I looked up taniwha images on Google and drew a taniwha on two pieced of A2 cartridge.  I then did the outlines in crayon.

The children then coloured in different sections of the taniwha each.

The next day we used blue dye to make it look like the taniwha was swimming in water.

With the tui, I again drew it and outlined it with crayon.  Then each child had the opportunity to colour in a section.  As you can see below, we then dyed the picture.

We also have been making tigers.  On the first day we painted a paper plate on one side orange.  The next day we painted the other side of the paper plate orange.

Then I prepared the things we would need for the tigers face.  I cut out orange paper for the ears.  I cut out green paper for the eyes and smaller black paper for the pupils.  I cut out lots of black strips of paper for the stripes.  I cut out pink noses.  I cut a lot of white wool for whiskers.  I also printed out a picture of a tiger's face.

Source:  http://fortune.com/2017/02/23/tiger-drone-hunt/ 

Naturally I demonstrated this.  We started off by putting some white crayon on the face for the white patches.  Then I demonstrated puting on the ears, the stripes, eyes and nose.

Full disclosure:  this is mine and the container of bits I prepared earlier.

Once again, you will notice amazing individuality and differences between each tiger.

We also went outside and looked at trees, discussed trees and drew trees.

Yes, this is mine.

Next we did the letter S and those activities (while finishing off our tigers).  I bought strawberries to observe, talk about, draw and eat.  I got cotton balls so we can make sheep.  We planted sunflower, pea, basil and coriander seeds into seed raising trays and some sweetcorn plants directly into the garden (which we also sketched).  And I envisaged letter S snakes.

We discussed the parts of the strawberry.  We noted the green hat on top.  That's where we went out to the gardens to look at the strawberry plants and see the flowers and the strawberries growing in the garden.  We went back inside to look at the strawberries again and noted the stalk, the seeds and the colour and shape.  We then sketched in pencil and used different crayons of reds, white and greens to colour in the strawberry.  I made the paper A5 size and asked them to draw big.

For the S snakes, I drew the S on an A3 piece of cartridge, and then demonstrated making a pattern after drawing "a fence to colour inside of" (I did an outline).  Each child choose their colour to outline their S and I did the outline and they then did their patterns inside.  This is still a work in progress.

For the sheep, I drew a white "cloud" outline with a crayon on each piece of blue paper.  We sat down together and I demonstrated drawing the head and ears and colouring it in.  Then I showed them how to do the legs.  Afterwards we had several different greens to do grass.

Then I demonstrated using my finger to put glue on the paper.  I demonstrated putting a cottonball on the sheep's body.  I asked them to go all around the outside first and then fill in the middle.  We ran out of cottonballs.

The second day I showed them how to put a face on the sheep and then we glued on the cottonballs until we ran out again.  So yes, a third session with cottonballs will be required.

I have a lot of spare seed raising trays and pots, so I pulled out enough for one each.  I demonstrated putting the seed raising mix into the trays and pots.  As we planted each seed we looked at it and discussed its size, shape and appearance.  We talked about what a seed needs to grow.

We have just started learning about the letter D, so I see dabbing dots on a 'd', dragons and dogs in the coming days.  And maybe donuts or dragonfruit.... anyone know where to buy dragonfruit in Hamilton?