School was crazy today. Crazy.

I take my own groups on an afternoon and we do speech and language work that basically involves group discussion about some pictures on a sheet. It's to try and build up their vocabulary and create links between associated words in their minds, but more often than not it ends up with me trying to clear up some of the ( Read more... )

Yes, I have insomnia again. It's 3:18am and I'm online, but tomorrow's my fortnightly day off so I don't care. Woo.

Found out on Thursday that Ofsted are coming to inspect us on Tuesday. Anxiety is quietly building in the pit of my stomach at the thought, as it's rather important we do well - the school got a notice to improve last summer, whatever ( Read more... )

Have had another long day at work, owing to some training on dyslexia (and then getting stuck with the clearing up of 15 or so dirty coffee cups, kettle etc. for the SECOND week running, nice). Learnt some interesting stuff, and some stuff I already knew, like the fact that saying aloud the colours the following words are written in is difficult:

( Read more... )

Saturday night, and apparently everyone has lives except me. How rude. Even my parents went out for the evening; I've had the house to myself and spent the entire night online, and quite a large proportion of that on myspace. Embarrassing.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that tomorrow will bring good news from Bernadette; we're hoping that she will ( Read more... )

Today was my first day back at work. It was an easy one - a full training day at a posh restaurant place, in a big conference room with chandeliers and round tables (reminded us of being at a wedding) and a lovely free dinner (lasagne and new potatoes and veg, and bread, and salad, and a choice of desserts - I had chocolate mousse). It was one ( Read more... )

Russia was really nice, and not as cold as I thought it would be. Had a bit of trouble getting home after we missed our train to Estonia and had to pay £200 for another flight home,(ended up spending the night in Prague airport, randomly) but other than that there were no major disasters. I will try to post my pictures on here when I get them ( Read more... )

God, the time seems to be flying by recently. Probably because I have a long list of things to do - the universe has to speed up so that I don't have enough time to do them all. It's like the law or something.

I still haven't sorted out my tax situation, or my pension, despite working at the school for over two months now. Realistically, how slack ( Read more... )

Went to see Ross Noble in Manchester last night. He was fantastic, as always. Felt bad for Bernadette when he made fun of Christians (as well as every other religion ever) but she didn't mind and all four of us (Bernadette, Cloklin, Mum and me) had tears from laughter at various points. The questions people asked at the end were all really specific ( Read more... )

Most embarrassing moment so far during my time as a teaching assistant: singing and dancing a special routine to Reach by S Club 7 with all the year three and four children.

They do this every week before VCOP (vocabulary, connectives, openers and punctuation, dont you know). It was my first time today and what is perhaps slightly more embarrassing ( Read more... )

Day Four of my new ETA job...and it's going well. 
Have had three days with the kids so far, as last Friday was a training day. I've learnt about half a class worth of names, so it's getting easier. On the training day the teachers were saying that it is utterly pointless addressing a child unless you use their name, because they will not answer you ( Read more... )