Make a wish upon a star

This term our class has been reading the novel Tale of a Tail by Margaret Mahy, which is all about a dog with a wand for a tail that grants wishes. Therefore, my colleague suggested that for writing this week they can write a story about what three wishes they would like to make.

Being a Year 0-3 class, I am sure that you can imagine the kinds of things that they wished that they could be, have or wished existed. On the board were written three starter sentences: I wish I could be..., I wish I had... and I wish there was. Under each heading we wrote what the children wished for. The main themes were: princesses, mermaids, fairies, horses, lego land, superpowers, magic and the list goes on.

As inevitably happens, especially when children have been out of class for swimming and other events, some were finished or nearly finished while others had only just begun. Therefore I decided that I needed to have something for the fast finishers to move on to that wouldn't leave the others behind but also might be an incentive to finish their writing. I designed a template of a wishing star after searching all over the internet and not finding what I wanted. On the template children will choose one wish and write it in the star. They will also draw a picture of their wish in the star behind their writing.

Here's the template we used

The display on the classroom wall with the star light star bright poem

We're still working on writing big enough so that their writing can be read from a distance but I'm really proud of he effort they put into these. Next time I will have to watch them like a hawk when they get to the glitter though as some went overboard (see stars on the right!).

Police Sketch Artist Lesson

Having no relieving work today I was at a bit of a loss as to what I could blog about, so I am taking a bit of a trip down memory lane today.

At the beginning of the year for my last placement I was teaching in a Year 7-8 class. During my full control I taught an integrated unit centring on the theme of 'Crime Never Pays'.  The text that the students read in relation to this unit was Alfred Noyes' narrative poem 'The Highwayman'. Our art lessons centred around the experience of a sketch artist.

Santa Craft Activity

I relieved in a wonderful new entrant class today. The classroom teacher left a great Christmas art activity that I wanted to share with you.

Each student was given a template of Santa's face. The children coloured him in and then cut him out. I then gave the children thin strips of white photocopy paper that the children had to roll around their pencils to curl. They also had pom poms to glue onto the end of Santa's hat. A very simple activity to take but the children loved it and did an amazing job of their Santa. I was very impressed with how well these students did at curling their Santa's beard as this is quite tricky. Good for practising fine motor skills!

This image is an example of what the template looked like (click on the image to go to the site) and the second image shows what the beard looks like when it's finished. I bet these will look great on the wall!

This was done with a second class and unfortunately we didn't have any pom poms but they still look great!

Feeling Christmas-y

I've just found Niamh's wonderful blog, Tell me and I'll forget, through Primary Teachers, Resources and Stress Relief. I particularly loved her Snowflake post. So much so that I'm trying it out for myself. I decided to add some colour to mine by drawing a pattern on each paper with colouring pencils before cutting and joining them together.


I can't wait to use this activity in the classroom! I wonder if we could kiwi it up by adding kiwiana Christmas drawings to the snowflakes?