As teachers I'm sure we have all come across challenging pupils. There are of course lots of systems available to teachers, rewards and positive reinforcement. Unfortunately we also need sanctions for children who do not behave appropriately. This can be where it gets tricky and I don't know about you but sometimes I wish I were like Miss Trunchbull with the chocky! In the spirit of positive behaviour management today I am reminding myself that things aren't too bad and if I have a positive outlook positive things will happen..... failing that it's only 3 weeks to half term!

Well bits of it!

So I finally got around to getting the pictures of my classroom from my phone and most of them are too blurry :(

But there are a few nice ones so here is my Bee classroom in action! 

There is a blog post on my brand new classroom coming, I promise.

I just haven't gotten around to taking the 'after' pictures yet!

So while we wait:

AARRGGGHHH Here comes the panic!

There are 4 working days left until school starts!!! FOUR! Where did the summer go? My classroom is still in chaos my plans don’t make any sense and I have no idea where I saved / left all the fantastic ideas and creations I made for my class….

I'm sure I was more organised last year, maybe I wasn't and it all worked out alright in the end.

It will be fine, listen to squirrel, breath, four days is still a long time. Isn’t it? ISN'T IT????

So it is mid August and I guess I need to start the back to school preparations.

It's just...... I don't want to!

I'm in holiday mode now, I can't think about organising my classroom and planning lessons and just being back into it all.

To help make it a little easier I have diarised in 3 days to go into school and prep the room. I have got my list all ready with EVERYTHING I could possibly need to do (available at my TPT store here) and I am working up to it!

I know all the things I need to get done, just, well, maybe I won't start today.....

Today we will have a look at videos of cute animals, being lazy, instead.

I want to tell you one of my favourite stories, it is the story of my meeting with the most wonderful man. It starts out with me swearing off men forever. I really wasn’t looking at all. I was out with some friends and we were dancing and drinking and talking. One of my friends grabbed my arm and pointed across the room, she shouted in my ear, “Look at him! He is lovely” or something like that.

I wasn’t really paying attention so just nodded and agreed and said back “Go and talk to him”

“No! I can’t do that! I can’t just go talk to him!”

“Yes you can. Just go do it.” I said, trying to be encouraging.

“Go find out if he’s single, please” she begged me. So I agreed and walked over to this gorgeous man with dark hair and a killer smile……

And that is how I met the man I am now spending my life with (and yes, I am still friends with the other girl, she found someone else).

 

The point of my telling you all this isn’t (just) to brag, it’s because my life wouldn’t be the way it is now if I hadn’t walked up to a stranger and asked him out (for my friend, erm…..).

I do appreciate that I am very lucky, some people have real social anxiety, some people actually cannot do this. But a lot of people can, they make an excuse, take the easy option and get someone else to do it. I have an insanely happy life that just seems to keep getting better and better. But I do believe a lot of my happiness and luck comes about because I am not afraid to do things, or if I am afraid, I do it anyway, so go do it yourself! You could be missing out on something great!

So for this week’s challenge we had to create a new product and I decided to be hard n myself and created a whole unit of work!

I am very happy with it, it is a complete unit on instruction writing. I thought that as I worked like crazy to finish this before the next challenge I would share my planning and creating process with you. 

When I am planning a unit of work I start with 3 big circles down the middle of a page of paper looks a bit like this: (only messier)

 

I then decide what I want my kids to learn by the end of the unit, I call this my big picture idea. Then I use each circle as a phase in the unit and I think about firstly what I want them to learn for each phase (for example phase one is usually recognise or get familiar with the text types). Then I brain storm lots of ideas for activities and lessons and just scribble them all down into whichever phase/circle they could relate to. My notes get very messy and end up looking a bit crazy like this:

 

Well they make sense to me and I guess that’s all that matters. Once I have all my ideas down and kinda organised I plan my lessons. I plan each lesson as if I had unlimited resources and time was no object. I do this because I can always scale them down a bit later and I find that once I have the full plan I can always find a way to work around resources I don’t have, (time is another issue).

 

So there you go my planning process! Here is my seller challenge pic for this week and you can find my complete unit on instruction writing here for TPT and here for TES.

 

If any wonderful lovely TPT’ers  also taking part in the challenge would like to swap products please comment and let me know.

 Nice to see you all again :)