A Long Weekend

The long weekend has finally arrived!  It's reunification day in Germany tomorrow, marking the day when the Berlin wall came down, so we get a bank holiday to celebrate tomorrow.  Since we had such a busy weekend last week, we decided not to make too many plans.  Matt went to see Duisburg football team play yesterday, with the partner of one of my work friends.  The group are all German, but made a real effort with Matt and he had a fantastic time watching Duisburg win.  It's nice to have friends outside of the school group.  My work pal and I went shopping and for lunch instead, and then met the boys in the pub after the football.  I went on a bit of a crafting spending spree, and had a brilliant time doing it!  I have a bit of a plan to hand make as many Christmas presents as possible this year...  The trouble is that I also bought loads of projects just for me to do too, so we'll see how I get on.

Today, I am not feeling too great.  I knew the cold was coming for about two weeks now, and I knew it would hit just in time for the long weekend.  I did manage to go to the pub on Friday night with friends, and made it through Saturday, but today I just don't feel great.  It's a good excuse for sitting watching TV and crocheting anyway.

The week has been a mixed one.  All of the staff seem quite unhappy at the moment, including me, but I had an impromptu meeting with the head of Primary on Friday, and he has made some suggestions for how things can improve for me.  I also had a really great lesson with a year 3 English class on Friday morning, so left on Friday feeling fairly positive.

It was science week at school this week, with the fantastic theme of Space.  We went on a trip to the planetarium on Wednesday, which was all in German, but was great fun anyway!  The kids really enjoyed it.  I was meant to go both days (y4-6 one day and reception-y2 the next day) but got called into pre-nursery to cover instead.  Not my favourite place to be!

Anyway, on Friday morning, the teacher said that we would be doing rocket poems and I offered to show the kids some photos of my trip to NASA, including some of the rocket launch we saw.  I also took in the apollo mission fabric patches that we got at NASA which the kids adored.  This class are quite noisy normally and have two very difficult boys, but the whole lot of them were glued to my every word!  Then they produced really good poems afterwards.  I showed them a photo of the rocket garden, and the enromous rocket and where they build the rockets, then we watched a video of the launch.  A great lesson.

The naughty boys are really into archaeology at the moment (they are digging up the grass at lunch time claiming to be searching for fossils), so the same teacher has asked if I will show them some photos from my digs.  The class obviously responds really well to first hand experience, so hopefully I can get them enthusiastic about archaeology too.