I had the Sunday Night Panic yesterday in a very bad way. I'm a lot calmer now, but I'd be lying if I told you that I was no longer worried about the Grand Inquisition.
A big part of my apprehension was the fact that today I started teaching the KGs again. I had a week to prepare, and come Thursday I was still scrambling to figure out what I was doing. Well, it wasn't the smoothest take-off ever, but under the circumstances, I was quite pleased with how things went today. Instead of working with one small group, the teachers, TAs, and I each had a group of 4-6 students who we led in the activity (cutting and gluing shapes to make a picture of fruit for the KG2s, and making animal tracks for KG1). The children, as always, were enthusiastic, but I also got some nice feedback from the teachers. That went a long way toward calming me down, since my schedule is now taken up halfway by these classes.
Year One...well, the clay pieces weren't fired, so I had to come up with plan B. I thought I'd do something tricky, something that might impress the inspectors, should they wander into my classroom. I chose to extend our 3-D clay houses into 3-D paper houses, making a sort of pop-up project. And I have faith that eventually it'll look quite clever, but I need to tweak my delivery of it. I need to get the students to act more independently when it comes to cutting the parts that will pop out - today I drew lines for them to cut, and it took too long to move through the entire classroom. I may draw a stop line for them and instruct them to trace their cutting lines with pencil and rulers. It seems like it will take too long to move through, but I've got to look at it as a skill that they will use again and again, I guess.
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