Busy, Busy! First Week Of Full Control!

Kia Ora!

Hey everyone. So today began my first week of full control. The time is just flying by! We really only have a few weeks left before school starts winding down for the summer.

The newspaper project is well underway. We are currently working as a class to create an edition of "The Room 15 Gazette", complete with a Current Events section, a Gossip Column, inside scoop specialists describing "Who's Who at Swanson School?", and Environmental Advocates Team, and Sports Reporters. The kids are having a ball with it so far! They love that they have ownership over their articles and will take on great responsibility by researching, interviewing, photographing, and layout designing for their whole project. Should be interesting! It was tricky to get things going at first but hopefully now that we have started the main part, things will go much more smoothly.

This entire week, our 1-hour afternoon block is dedicated to a music rotation which will involve all Nikau rooms switching to each of the teachers for a music lesson. Its really quite cool!. We also have 2- 1-hour Athletics blocks throughout the week in which I will be teaching kids how to high-jump... Just as a note, until a few days ago...I had absolutely no idea how high jump actually works...go figure that now I will be instructing it! :) Oh well, go with the flow I suppose!

Tomorrow I have a unique chance to roam around the school and simply visit a few classes to see various teaching styles, methods, and age levels at Swanson. My cooperating teacher is on release tomorrow so she suggested that I take advantage of having some time to observe. I think it will be truly worthwhile!

This past weekend was absolutely fantastic! On Saturday, Jan took Laura, Cory and I along a scenic drive to some amazing lookouts. For the afternoon, we headed to Karekare Beach which was so neat! Everything here is just so beautiful and natural. I am constantly surrounded by green and rugged landscape, I love it! Then on Sunday, Rachel took Laura and I, along with 2 of her other friends from out of town, on a hike up and around the Rangitoto Island Volcano. It was so cool! We made a day of it by taking the ferry and doing one of the longer, sceinic routes. The views from the top of the volcano were amazing and I learned so much! I will try to post some photos here as soon as possible.

Well, thats all for now..I have quite a bit to do so take care everyone!

Cheers!