World Book Day

World Book Day is coming! I love an opportunity to talk about books and share them so I am embracing World Book Day! The tokens have arrived and I have put up posters to build up the anticipation. Unfortunately that day upper KS2 is heading out of school to do something else (it will be good but not book related!) which means I am going to be relying on other staff to do things around school. I have been thinking about what I would like to do during the whole week and I have come up with the following;

-Launch BookCrossing within my school

– Competition- the good old take pictures of yourselves reading in funny places that we can stick up in the library!

– Readathon

– Reading/ Chillout time at lunchtimes in my room and the library.

– Look at the video clips on the World Book Day website which show read extracts of the short books available to spend your precious voucher on!

These are just a selection of my first thoughts and I plan to add to them throughout the week. I hope whatever you are doing for WBD you have a fantastic time! Feel free to share your ideas in the comments and if you have written blog posts about it I would love to read them and add them as links here. Also if your class blog about WBD I would love to share them with my children.

Blush…

It seems to have been a while since I blogged! This is just a quick post to say hello and have a catch up. I have spent the last few months settling into my new school and getting used to being Literacy Coordinator which I absolutely adore. I have so many things I want to do but never enough time to do them all but I am sure this is something echoed by many teachers all over! Today I attended TeachMeet Midlands, a wonderful event organised by @squiggle7 and @mikemcsharry. As well as getting inspired by some wonderful presentations it was great to see some familiar faces and new faces as well! I felt a bit daft staring at people’s labels but it was a great feeling when you found someone you tweet with regularly!

 

Over the next week I plan to blog about several things. Firstly how I will put into practice the ideas gained from today. Secondly my plans for our school library which is within my remit and thirdly thinking about how to promote reading within my school.

 

I really want to be more regular with this blog, how do people manage it?!

A very quick hooray!

Showed my class their class blog today and they loved it! All sorts of ideas and questions already coming through 🙂 I will post later in the week to share their ideas and what we have done so far.

Class Blog and BookCrossing

Well things have been moving well! Yesterday I got some great help from people on twitter and in the end I accepted a kind offer from @HGJohn tot up a blog through him.

And here is is! I am very excited about this and my HT wants me to discuss and show it at the staff meeting on Monday. However I need a little more time to add some things I think!

I look forward to allowing the children chance to share their work and hopefully collaborate with other schools.

And talking of collaboration, I have hopefully found a local teacher to work with on BookCrossing so fingers crossed that works out!

New School Thoughts

This week I started at a new school and it has been a great few days. I have a Year 4/5 class and am working closely with the Year 5/6 teacher in order to ensure our Year 5 children share the same experiences this year. I am also Literacy Co-Ordinator and although my HT wants me to settle in before I get started on things I can’t help but having some ideas about things I want to do this year.

– Set up a class blog and keep it going through the year. At the moment I am trying to decide on the best blogging platform to use. I asked for ideas on twitter and got a great link by @relativism to one of her own blog posts here. I have been inspired by many of my twitter networks fantastic class blogs and I hope to become more involved in the collaboration that has been evident this year. I also want to set up a Maths Challenge Blog with challenges etc to challenge our pupils.

– Children’s Book Week- This occurs this term and we have a basic plan of what we are doing with visits from an author, dress up days etc. I am currently thinking of other things we can do and would like to use it as an opportunity to launch BookCrossing in the school. I have been a user and fan of BookCrossing for many years and am thinking about the best way to introduce it and use it in my school.

These are the two things at the moment that I can easily implement and get started.

I hope everyone had a wonderful summer and has a fantastic new academic year!

Tower to the Sun by Colin Thompson

I was thinking today about what my blog post could be as I wanted to keep up the momentum! I am currently sorting out my classroom ready to move schools and I found my well loved copy of this book ‘Tower to the Sun’ by Colin Thompson. It sparked off an idea of trying to use my blog as a way to keep track of great books I love, share them and hopefully get ideas in return! ‘Tower to the Sun’ is a wonderful book about the dangers Earth faces in the future. I use it for upper KS2 as it has a lot themes that can be used for discussion. I managed to get four pages of teaching ideas for it! The story is very thought-provoking and the illustration are beautiful, you could lose yourself for hours in them!

When I was a trainee teacher I was very much inspired by Esme Raji Codell and her passion for books. If you haven’t heard of her I would recommend you take a look at some of her ideas.

Does anyone have any particular recommendations for books for children? I have many more to come in the coming weeks if anyone is interested and would love to get some new finds myself!

New Blog

Yesterday I was supposed to be going to TeachMeet East in Norwich but due to house-hunting suties I was unable to go in person. Instead I watched online and have to say congratulations to the wonderful organisers for their hard work. Such an inspirational set of presentations and discussion as well as wonderful company on Twitter to go with it! I was so inspired that I have decided to have a second attempt at starting a blog to help myself develop as a teacher. I get so many wonderful ideas from my online network and I want to ensure I am using them effectively to become the kind of teacher I want to be. I work best when I have goals to strive for so my goals for this week are the following;

– Use ZooBurst in my teaching this week. I first learned of ZooBurst on Twitter and quickly signed up for an account. This week I aim to create and use one with the children with the aim of booking the laptops and letting the children create their own. Read this great blog post by @kvnmcl for more ideas.

– Use my Flip Video cameras more. I am currently in charge of Humanities at my school and recently ordered two Flip Video Cameras. As I am only at the school until the end of this term I want to get as much use out of them as possible and encourage other teachers to use them too!

If you have any hints or tips for a new blogger than please let me know!