January 2010 Archives

Inspired by Tom Barrett's Twitter post about his classroom, and asking for photos of others, I took these photos at the end of yesterday.

Clearly, the chairs are up for cleaning, and the room is a little messy as we'd made biscuits and there's a fair bit of drying art work lying around - but these things happen in a working classroom!

I took photos from a high angle to avoid showing you just the backs of chairs stood in each corner of the room. It's a Victorian building (just, 1901) with high ceilings. The room was converted from being the staffroom a few years ago and is quite long but pretty narrow for Year 5 children and furniture - makes getting around a little difficult.

If you want to know about any of the displays or work, just post a comment.

Photos taken on an iPhone 3GS, click for a larger version.

EDIT (12:11): Altered the pop up images to have scrollbars and be resizable.

I'm often in two minds about discussing the weather. For one thing, it's so fleeting - one sunny moment in this country could be closely followed by a raging storm. For another, it's deeply personal - I love autumnal weather the most for it's rich variety and colourful beauty. But the main reason I despair of weather based writing is that it's tediously repetitive.

We're currently in the grip of the worst winter of my lifetime. The worst since 1981 (I was born in 1983). Schools are closing for, what I'm sure seems to many parants, unnecessary reasons. Today, I couldn't get to my school to teach - I, along with many others, couldn't even get out of my street. It's only my fourth snow based reason for not working in my career. I know people who haven't been to school, to teach or learn, this decade yet.

I find the whole thing incredibly frustrating.

(Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone)

Location:Leeds, United Kingdom

Right now, I realise that the website has suffered from one of my usual lulls of activity. As always, a number of factors create these gaps. This time around it was work, being ill, difficulties managing time and a lack of appropriate motivation.

My job being as it is, teaching children, it often means that evenings are accounted for by marking books, planning future lessons and other uninteresting things. Accompanying this is a cloud of tiredness.

The long and the short of it is that these lulls will happen and I'll try to minimise them.

It was with that in mind that I stumbled upon BlogPress, an app for my iPhone allowing me to blog when and wherever I happen to be. So there may be more things posted here, for better or worse! This post starts the BlogPress era, long may it continue!

(Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone)

Location:Leeds, United Kingdom