A Challenging Week

This week I really struggled with the behaviours in my class. I've put so much energy into making things fun, relevant, interesting etc that it really gets to me when my class won't listen, or boos at my activities. As I don't tolerate this sort of behaviour, I find I have to deal with all this rubbish before I can get to teaching and inspiring them. Of course, it's not the whole class, and generally, I don't think that they do it out of spite. There are just a number of children who don't think before they speak and can often appear quite rude and disrespectful.

Early in the week I had to call off a Circle Time because more than a quarter of the class were making a joke of it. Maybe I could understand it if the kids were 11 year olds, but these are 6 year olds! Feeling discouraged, I only did one more circle time that week and I included lollies and balloons in the lesson as an attempt to win over the kids who were starting to revolt! I also had them apologise to the class for having spoilt the previous circle time.

After explaining an art activity this week, one of my boys yelled out, "That's STUPID". I sent him to another class for the afternoon with a Maths worksheet instead. I hope he will think twice before insulting my lesson again! Later in the week a boy got frustrated with his wombat origami and yelled "This is so dumb!". Sticking to my new plan, he missed out on the rest of the activity, despite his repeated begs to join back in. Like I said earlier, I just have some very vocal students who let EVERYONE know if they don't like an activity.

On the positive side, most of my wombat lessons and activities were well-received by the class (see my previous blog for more details). They seem particularly excited about our new 'pet' wombat who they will get to take home for a night and write about his visit in his journal. The assessment tasks I set showed that most of them had learnt new facts about wombats during the week and could make the links between Jackie French's own experiences and the stories she wrote.

Next week I will be out of school for a couple of days, co-convening an Athletics Carnival, and on Friday we will have book week. Hopefully, that will give me a little time to recover from the tough week with my class, and renew my love for teaching them! Hopefully.

Author Study - Jan Brett and Jackie French

At the end of last week I concluded a 3-week author study on US author/illustrator Jan Brett. There were similarities to the author study I ran with my New York City kindergarten class, but as always, I made a few adaptations. Whilst in New York, I had much easier access to all of Jan Brett's books, and could even get multiple copies of some for use in small reading groups. Here in Australia, I can't access her books, but I have much better computer access and so have made better use of Jan Brett's website. I really enjoyed using her resources on the Smart Board in my classroom. I really recommend her site to teachers - particularly those in the US - as she does absolutely everything she can to share her work with children. There are great Newsnotes that show how the stories took shape, regular newsletters (in audio format) for children to hear what she is up to and be inspired, and even video snippets where Jan Brett takes children step-by-step through how she draws her characters.

So, having said all that, this week we began an author study of an Australian author - Jackie French. In many of Jackie French's books, the main characters are animals, and more specifically Australian native animals. Jackie French has a particular interest in wombats. So today we began with one of Jackie French's wombat books - Smudge. And prior to reading, we thought of all the things we know about wombats and listed these on a fish-bone chart under the headings: food, characteristics, appearance and habitat. As it was, my students had a great prior knowledge as their starting point. I found some really great internet resources to expose students to wombats visually. Flickr had this great set about Wally the Wombat, and You Tube has some videos of wombats in action. I particularly liked this one about a wombat getting comfortable. Later in the week we are going to read Diary of a Wombat, and then my students are going to take turns to take home a stuffed-toy wombat and write in his diary. I think (and hope) that they will be very excited about this idea.

I'm now a big fan of using author studies in the classroom to motivate students to read and inspire their writing. (And I had fun finding all the web resources about wombats!)

Update: I now have a way of making some teaching materials available to you. These are for use in the classroom, not for commercial purposes. Please contact me for further information. I am happy to email worksheets that are not compatible with Google Docs.
Jan Brett Author Study Overview
Jackie French Author Study Overview
Jackie French Worksheets: My Facts About Wombats