Week 2 - Creative!

Goals:
To make time for my mental and physical health. 
To carry out all my roles (teacher, HSA director and Across Schools CoL) to the best of my ability. 
To support staff wellbeing. 
To actively maintain a positive personal outlook. 

• Visits to the gym this week: One on Saturday again. The first-week excitement of joining a new gym QUICKLY wore off. 
• McDonald's eaten: one BLT and coffee when I was running so late I wouldn't get a chance to heat my porridge before my fully booked day began. 
• Casual sports games played this week: 1 game of touch again - I didn't stay to fill in for random teams because Kurt was patiently waiting for me to get home to watch Game of Thrones!
• Books read: I'm slowly slowly working my way through the book Karen gave me at our Week 1 Holiday Book swap!

• Teaching highlights: 
• My absolute favourite was the double-period study session with Year 9. I had created a series of revision activities to help them study for their upcoming test, and they ABSOLUTELY LOVED bringing it up to me, getting feedback and then getting to colour in another rectangle to show their progress on the board! The majority of the class worked incredibly well through a full 95 minute block of time.

• Year 13 used play-doh to illustrate one of three delivery methods for getting CRISPR into cells. They're presenting them to each other in class tomorrow. 

• On Friday last period I asked Russell to come and help me run a busy practical lesson with Year 9 to reward them for their fabulous study and sitting of their first science test. It definitely required 2 teachers. We also had my student teacher Caitlin helping to supervise, and Chris the teacher aide there for safety too. On one half of the room we had three stations; dry ice rockets, dry ice bubbles and dry ice target-practice. In the other half of the room we had elephant's toothpaste! All the students absolutely loved it. I haven't trusted them with chemicals since they showed they couldn't listen to safety instructions during the tectonic-plate sandwich debacle of '19. It was time to give them another chance - and they did MUCH better this time around.

• CoL things: I'm waiting on permission to speak to a few teachers around their teaching of reading comprehension, but need to follow the right procedure to do so. 
• I ran a 'create' session in the Monday PD which 3 people attended. We all created educational songs. We quickly recorded Vaughan's one about language features. 

• Health Science Academy: This week I ran our second parent fono evening, which was attended by Tuliana, David and Ola from the WDHB, two guest speakers - Sela and Agnes - three parents/caregivers (one I hadn't met before, so it was lovely to connect) and three students, two of whom gave speeches! It was an enjoyable night. I just wish more parents had made the commitment to come. One thing I learnt was not to run it on a Wednesday in Term 3 as it clashes with church events, and to call earlier - probably even before sending home letters (that seem to remain in the bottom of student's bags)! 
• I also recorded Leo and Makoni's speech, in the hope that it would help them to gain 4 Speech credits in English. They both spoke for over 4 minutes and were both confident to speak off-speech spontaneously. They were engaging and entertaining! I've sent the video off to their English teachers :) 

• Teacher wellbeing support: this week we had a shared lunch on Friday, and about... 12 teachers contributed food? Everyone enjoyed it. Will have to repeat in Term 3. 

• Gratitude emails sent: tagged Graham in a facebook post telling him he's doing a good job both 'Dadding and teaching.'