I started this term at the beginning of this week feeling rather unenthused and uninspired. Planning hadn't gone so well - I found it hard to pull my mind back to work after having a complete break and playing music for two weeks instead. Now it's Thursday. The kids I work with have rekindled my love of teaching. Their life experience is so limited and they are so excited about everything new and different (which for adults is humdrum and normal); their enthusiasm and curiosity is infectious. I don't think I would last long in an environment without some sort of creativity happening on a daily basis - children are very creative beings and have such original ways of creating understanding of the world around them. I dream of being a child like that one day!!

Children and Visual Art

Children approach the viewing of art with a very fresh perspective. We sorted posters of the works of Kandinsky, Matisse, Van Gogh, Renoir and Picasso - the children didn't know which works were done by which artists. Mostly they grouped the pieces "correctly" i.e. the works by the same artist were put together. The interesting part came when they were asked to justify their groupings - some based it on colour choices: "This artist (Picasso) likes using different sorts of blues and so these go together"(A five year old). "This artist (Kandinsky plus one of Picasso's works) uses a whole lot of exciting shapes and colours all overlapping each other - it's noisy!" My favourite comment was about a Picasso work which has two people with arms outstretched on a background of blue sky and fluffy clouds: "The people are so free - it's such a happy painting like they have no stresses at all. It can't go with those paintings (Picasso works) because there's too much stress in those. This was painted by a happy person." (An 8 year old)
There were some surprises when the children found out which paintings were made by which artists. Perhaps the biggest surprise was an early work of Kandinsky, which the children had put with Van Gogh.
The whole point of the session, apart from preparing for a trip to the art gallery on Monday, was to encourage and model talking about art. The children's responses delighted me, and in many ways humbled me. I hope that as these young people grow up, they retain their youthful perspective and willingness to share their perceptions with others.

Learning versus teaching

There is always, for me, an excitement to teaching - watching the progress students make, particularly those students who have taken some time to make that progress. However, what I find even more exciting is what I learn as I teach. Not just about students but about myself and my view of the world. I've decided to have music lessons from a much admired musician friend and I am getting such a buzz out of being the pupil for a change. The spin off is that I can now see my own personal learning happening every day in the class room - it's a mode!! How exciting to work with students and guide them through this journey of self discovery - as long as it is a positive experience for them. Sharing my passion for learning is changing my view of teaching, albeit little by little.

Christmas

I wonder how many of the children I teach understand why we do this Christmas thing. I asked my nearly 20 year old daughter what she thought. She doesn't believe in "Jesus and all that stuff", but she intends to make sure her children know about it and the Saint Nicholas story as well. It seems a shame that something so simple yet deep and meaningful gets drowned in an avalanche of commercialism.

End of year spelling testing

Having just finished the school year, I am taking the opportunity to reflect on the outcomes of the end of year spelling testing for my Year 4 to 8 students. I'm under no obligation to do this, but it's a useful exercise. Thinking back over the year, I'm working out what worked and what didn't.

On the whole, results are "good" - most of my students are where they should be or beyond. It's the students who were behind at the beginning of the year and are still that way that are a worry. I do lots of reading and research, particularly in the teaching of spelling, to improve the effectiveness of what I do with these kids - they all know lots of ways to spell the long vowel sounds now! The hard part is realising that they still can't spell as well as they should be able to!

I've decided that there are two types of spellers: those that find it easy to spell accurately, and those that find it very difficult, time consuming and downright frustrating trying to learn to spell. Fortunately I was one of the first sort, although I think that makes it really hard to understand why others struggle so much.

I've just watched a DVD :"Take a fresh look at the way we teach reading and spelling" by Joy Allcock. I think there is something I've been missing out in my teaching which hopefully will help next year: I've taught the letter combinations for as many of the sounds as I can, but the students don't know which pattern to use when. On this DVD, Joy gives students guidelines which certainly will be helpful, for example, that words ending with a k sound will have ic if it's a multisyllabic word, and ick if there is only one syllable. Sounds obvious doesn't it! My kids know there's a choice, but don't have the information to make the right choice.

So next year, I'll get these students to work with me to find out what the guidelines are. They were very good at learning the patterns, but fairly consistently applied the wrong pattern - a bit like a spell checker on steroids!