Day 135: 15/5/13
It didn't seem as cold this morning, thankfully! When I got to school I had to organise the classroom for making a mask! They had planned a design of a mask in their reading groups and today they had to make it!
We had to to one more round of reason groups at the very start of the day as one group still had to plan theirs. Then we started into making the masks! They were fine but just a bit noisy. There's usually an aide in the class but this morning she was sent somewhere else! But the aide from next door come in as they have the student teacher aswell. We needed two people at least to help them with their masks!
After that the class had specialist lessons all day- Art, Performing Arts and PE and they weren't in the classroom at all. The teacher usually has from 11- 3:30 to plan! Wouldn't that be lovely!! I had to do release instead. Between lunch and recess I was in a 3/4 class who were chatting about fractions and what fractions they had in their lunch! They also played some fraction games so that was easy enough. One class did it while the others went to the garden and then we swapped.
After lunch I was supposed to have one session free to plan for tomorrow and Friday and then release another class. But the PE teacher had to go as his child was sick. So I had to take another 1/2 class for PE and then take my own class! Busy, busy!! The teacher had all the equipment left out and they were hair doing throwing and catching games so it was fine, but they were noisy! It meant I had no time to figure out what we're doing tomorrow either. So I had to figure that out after class. Most of the day is taken up with various activities so there's just one lesson to plan really.
At home time it lashed rain. I thought it might ease up but it didn't. So I got soaked- walking 25 minutes to the train is not a good idea in the rain! Most of the walk is along a busy road aswell so I managed to get soaked by a passing car!! The joys of being without a car!
When I got back to the hostel I true to put a few bits on a PowerPoint about school in Australia. It'll be easier for the kids to listen to me if they have some pictures to look at. Mam was off as it was Wednesday so she skyped for a few minutes, Mike was online too so I skyped him afterwards. Then Eimhin rang so I was chatting to him! It was raining in Cahergal so the kids had come in quickly from break so they all saw me! It's a bit tricky in the hostel to find somewhere to Skype with nothing behind you so today I was sitting at the lockers in the room as I needed the laptop plugged in! I'm sure they were wondering what was behind me! There were a few other girls in the room too- Im sure they think I'm demented!!
The kids seem really excited though so I'm looking forward to it tomorrow! I've everything I'm going to talk about to do with school over here all on the PowerPoint and its sent to Eimhin so hopefully it's what he was expecting! We couldn't really check today with the kids all listening!!