Back at School

This is week 4 of the school year and it has been a busy start to the school year. having been away for 6 months it is surprising the little things I had forgotten but, to use an old cliche, it is like riding a bike and things are running smoothly now.
Science is a major focus in my class now, not only in the in depth unit I am teaching but also in incidental things and I have been sowing the seeds for something I want to do with my class later in the term. The major unit is about the rocky shore which makes sense to follow what I was working in last year. we have had four classes visiting two different rocky shore sites. Two classes visited the reef at Kawaroa while two classes visited the Tapuae Marine Reserve. The following day they swapped locations. The Kawaroa is walking distance from school and not part of a Marine Reserve so was a good place to be able to compare findings with. Before the visits each class watched a power point of species they might find down there and as they walked down to their first quadrat I heard them saying things like "there's a snakeskin chiton" and "look a radial limpet' It was quite exciting to know they had learnt these things. In groups they completed three quadrats at the three intertidal zones. They repeated this at the other reef on the following day. They also had time on both days to explore on their own. Back at school we are looking at the data we collected, and have other things planned. The other teachers have all talked about the children working like scientists on the reef, another comment that has excited me. Here is a video I made about how to collect data from a quadrat.

The incidental science teaching has been wide and varied, from watching a video about whale sharks and discussing what they eat (this came out of a current events contribution) to looking for living things in an area outside our classroom and talking about what makes athing alive, to how scientists would go about the same task, and why they would do this. This is also the seed I am planting in my class at the moment for a project later in the term.

In between the science there is writing, maths, swimming, art, music, reading, testing, and all the usual things that fill the start of the school year. It is certainly different from the lst two terms I had, but I am enjoying being in front of a class again.