It's Eid at the weekend, Eid Mubarak! In order to celebrate Eid and share this happy time with our families, we have been busy making Eid cards. I decided to use a very simple card template at this stage in the year. We painted the palms of our hands gold and bronze, and mixed a beautiful emerald green for the fingers that looked like the beautiful colour you see on the roofs of Mosques. We printed these onto white paper and attached them to rainbow cards reminiscent of the beautiful colourful clothes that people wear to celebrate Eid.
Next week we are having an Eid party so I look forward to seeing the children have a wonderful time in their rainbow colours. It's one of my favourite times of year.
Something else I love about this time of year is the smell of the changing seasons. Although it's now dark when I get up for work (and getting up in the dark does make waking up early a chore!) the smell of the air when I step outside, more than makes up for it. There's a wonderful stillness when it's dawn and being able to be part of that is very calming and beautiful if you take a moment to breathe it in before you begin your busy day.
Nursery decided to go for a walk in the park and as luck would have it we picked the sunniest day of the week. It was still cold and we zipped our coats up (a good job, as it started to rain just as we set off back to school!) and set off together to the park on our first walk of the year. We are lucky to have a nice big park just a few streets away and took a few bags with us to collect some nice Autumny things to use back in the nursery. The iPads really proved their worth as photos and notes could be quickly snapped, ready to upload straight to Tapestry without requiring you to take your eyes off the group. We collected so many conkers, oak branches and beautiful leaves that we were able to make some leaf prints straight away and save some for focused work next week!
I was wary of the leaves turning damp and unpleasant in the plastic bags so have transferred them to a wire basket and strung a garland of the most colourful across the nursery to dry out and bring the Autumn indoors to us.
I love to find new uses for things, and try to think outside the box when it comes to my classroom. The app store told me that the post-it app was app of the week, so I downloaded it, as I usually do, to test it out. This app is AMAZING. It allows you to snap a photo of a group of post-its and reorganise them on your device. Obviously this is incredibly useful for those meetings where you end up with lots of post it's on the wall (surely i'm not the only one where this is seemingly all my meetings?) After clapping my hands in joy, my first thought was to things other than post-its, naturally. It occurred to me to lay out the children's Eid cards on the floor and snap a photo of them from above to see if it would recognise the inside portion of the card as a post-it. It did. Now all those first signatures are stored on my ipad in evernote, which the post-it app neatly allowed me to export the now organised signature-turned-writing samples to, I plan to use this method to collect samples and turn them into class writing sample boards which I can store in evernote as a progress scrapbook, this will give me a massive amount of qualitative data, but add only minutes to my assessment timeframe. Truly amazing.
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