My Favourite Go-To Teaching Sites

Reflective Teaching 30 Day Blog Challenge

Day 26: What are your favourite go-to sites for help/tips/resources in your teaching?

*Pinterest - for ideas and resources for the classroom. I found some great stuff for our Around the World With the Gingerbread Man lastnight.

*Teachers Pay Teachers - for resources that you just don't have time to make yourself!

*Other teacher's blogs! - I have a bookmarked, pinned and put many blogs on my Blogger blog list that  go to for ideas, resources and tips.

If I need help or advice I use sites such as:

*Twitter - for education groups and chats

*Facebook - where I have joined education groups such the ones mentioned through this link and my own personal teacher network groups.

Does anyone have any go-to sites that they would like to share? I am always open to finding new sites.

My Ideal Collaboration Between Students

Reflective Teaching 30 Day Blog Challenge

Day 25: The ideal collaboration between students, what would it look like?

My ideal collaboration would look like a group of students engaged in a task together and communicating about that task. They would be asking questions, thinking critically, sharing ideas, discussing alternatives, making decisions and giving and receiving instructions.

Ideally this would be evenly spread throughout the group of children with them all contributing. However in the real world we often see the same children talking and the same children listening. This is something that I would have to scaffold in my classroom as their are 1) children of varying ages, 2) some shy students that are to unsure to contribute and 3) some students that tend to dominate if allowed.

Would love to do more of this collaborative learning in the classroom and I think I might try it tomorrow. I have five Year 3 students, three of which could use a push to collaborate. It would be nice to show them a task and get them to teach it to other students rather than it being me that does all the directing!

My Favourite Learning Trend

Reflective Teaching 30 Day Blog Challenge

Day 24: Which learning trend captures your attention the most and why?

I like this prompt today because it made me actually go and research the learning trends as I wasn't immediately able to identify which trend I was in interested in. The trend that I was the most excited about, although not new, was the focus on being creative maker and problem solver rather than a passive learner of facts.

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!).

Involving the Community in the Classroom

Reflective Teaching 30 Day Blog Challenge

Day 23: Write about one way that you "meaningfully" involve the community in the learning in your classroom. If you don't do so yet, describe one way you could get started.

This is something that I don't do in the classroom yet. So far I have been concentrating on getting to know the children in my classroom, school and their parents. I haven't branched out much into the wider community.

Also our first few weeks focused on Myself and at the moment our learning focus is centred on the theme of 'Around the World with the Gingerbread Man', so we are thinking bigger than our community at the moment and branching out to other countries and cultures. However we have children from the Philippines and children with ancestry from India and Germany so there is a possibility that we could use their parents to teach us about those cultures in the classroom and perhaps there are other members of the community that might be able to come in and share their culture with the children as well.

Next term we could do find a way to bring in a member of the community that fits in with our learning so that we can use our community knowledge in a meaningful way. Maybe also we just need an open community day where we can invite the wider community to interact with the students and share their work with them.

My Professional Learning Network

Reflective Teaching 30 Day Blog Challenge

Day 22: What does your Professional Learning Network look like and what does it do for your teaching?

I consider myself lucky to have a access to a broad professional learning network of teachers and educators in many different shapes and sizes:

• Twitter - chats, hashtags and contacts
• Open educational Facebook Groups
• Closed Facebook Groups e.g. my cohorts from teaching college (I have access to two cohorts as I did my course part time)
• Teachers from professional placements
• Teachers from schools that I have received at
• Teachers from the school I work in currently
• Beginning teachers and mentors from my PRT/Mentor workshop

What this means for my teaching is that I have several people from many different stages of teaching an/or education service that I can call upon if I need some advice, guidance or fresh ideas to use in the classroom. It also means that I can use this network of people to discuss and reflect on my teaching practice and and further my professional development in more informal ways than on an official course or workshop.

Bringing Outside Interests into the Classroom

Reflective Teaching 30 Day Blog Challenge

Day 21: Do you have other hobbies/interests that you bring into your classroom teaching? Explain.

As a lover of literature I am constantly bring the enthusiasm I have for both reading and writing into the classroom. I enjoy sharing stories with the children in my class. I think it is great to be able to share my enjoyment of these subjects and hopefully infect the children with my enthusiasm.

I also share stories of my travels with children and relate them to relevant class discussions. It is great to share my experiences with the children and help them learn about places beyond their knowledge.

It is also good for the children in my class to see me as more than just a teacher. Therefore, where appropriate, I share things that are happening in my life. For example, my sister had a baby and I became an aunty for the first time and I shared this moment with the class. It was special to be able to tell them things about my life and let them get to know me more as a person outside of the school.

BUT

I do think this is something that I could do more as a teacher and bring in my interests and hobbies into the learning in the classroom as my excitement and passion for things are what make learning more interesting and engaging.