here goes everything.

I'm convinced that with the end of this week, the end of all weeks normal is coming near. I know I've mentioned this quite a bit over the past couple of posts, but there's really so much going on with end of the year events over the next couple of weeks. As I've been planning for next week over the past couple of days, I'm realizing that pretty much half of next week is spent doing various activities that are sort of outside what normally qualifies as teaching. For all of Swanson, New Zealand's Life Education program is here over the next week or so doing various programs for the students depending on their years. The Totara team still has two sessions for Out of the Shadows this week, dealing with drugs and substance abuse. So setting aside 2 sessions for that, in addition to time being taken out to prepare the years 7 and 8 for the leavers' assembly coming up in week 9, and I'm left with just some minimal planning to take care of for this week.

While at times like this it doesn't seem to be too much planning for the next couple of days - it's actually taking me much more time to plan these lessons than those for my other placement. I'm really finding myself all over the place in terms of what I'm teaching. I'm finding myself planning four different reading lessons for each day of reading that we have. This comes alongside three math lessons for each day of maths, as well as multiple writing sessions throughout the week, several special topic sessions, sprinkled here and there with fitness, spelling, and other miscellaneous tasks.

I'm actually really excited for the upcoming reading session this Monday, since the novel Castaway will finally be arriving for my Tawa group. We've been intending to start our novel study with the book for the past week, but due to some problems, we've been waiting for its arrival to school, which has been horribly delayed. There's also the upcoming bake sale that my other Rimu reading group has been working to set up. It started off after a reading we did about Tsunamis and kind of branched off into a follow-up activity trying to think of ways to create our own tsunami-relief efforts. So expect me to be wringing my hands, waiting to see how it goes over and hoping that we're able to pull it all off in order to get some money to send off to the Red Cross relief effort for victims in Samoa.

In a way, this entire upcoming week is going to be fairly exciting, not only with reading, but also with the upcoming Athletics day that qualified years 7 & 8 will be going to this Friday at Waitakere Stadium. After various trials for track and field over the past couple of weeks, it's time for the Swanson student to show off their mad talents.

As for now, my brain can't quite handle the excitement, so I'm off to catch some z's and get some rest before another jam-packed day. The life of a teacher is definitely anything but dull.

Cheers my blog-followers!