Turning 26..

It's happened...I am officially over halfway to 50!

Today has been lovely - M, P, H and G all joined me for an 18km trek around the Lancashire fells in the Trough of Bowland area followed by a pub dinner in Clitheroe.  I am, yet again, tired but happy!  I love having a birthday that falls in the holidays every year, it means I can have the full day to celebrate!

I always get a little maudlin around the time of my birthday and start thinking about all the things in my life I would still like to achieve, but for now I am going to leave that.

Of course there's lots of things I have on my ever-growing bucket list, but I find if I dwell too much on these it detracts from the things that I am doing right now.  I don't want to let anything get in the way of giving the best I can to the kids who I am working with at the moment, and if that means putting my bucket list back in the cupboard for another few months before I get it out and polish it up then I can cope with that!

So, not today, but watch this space!

Mental Money Maths...

Teaching my Year 11 bottom set today and we were doing a little bit of mental maths with money problems and I asked the boys what 68p + £7.58 was and CB got all excited and shouted "£15.60!!"

When the other lads started laughing he looked down and said "I can't help the things that go on in my head when I do maths Miss!!"

I love these kids

Expeditions and getting out!

February is proving to be an absolute corker of a month!  Not only has the SixNations 2014 tournament kicked off, I have got plans for every single weekend either going out walking with friends or for the Duke of Edinburgh's Award or going to rugby matches.  I'm so excited to be able to get out and about a bit more.

As I write this I'm sitting on my back stoop stretching my legs and feeling them throb from all the walking we've been doing this weekend.  I LOVE THIS FEELING!

I've spent the weekend in Cheshire walking with some of the other DofE leaders from schools in the area and it's been brilliant!  We did 16km yesterday and 19km today and I'm exhausted but so refreshed by it.  I really hope that this is how our kids feel when they come back from a DofE weekend - it's such an awesome opportunity for the kids to get out and experience something different and I always find that they are so excited by the prospect of getting out of Liverpool for a couple of days!

Here's a few pictures of the weekend (I need to stop instagramming...)

Mud!!!

Team Attack!

A & G

Peckforton Castle, Cheshire

100% Scouse!

Much to the amusement of my Year 11 class today I made a little mistake when dictating a question about an antique clock and managed to miss out the L...For the next 5 minutes there was phallic humour overload from all of the students who could not stop rolling about laughing every time they looked at me!!  Doubt I'll be living this one down any time soon!

About 5 minutes before the end of the lesson one of the boys, J, who is possibly my favourite student in the school (not that you're supposed to have favourites), came to speak to me and suggested that I take a quiz on the Echo website to see how many questions about being a Scouser I could get right.  Amazingly, I managed to score 100% - apparently I have been living here too long!

Proof!!

I think there's so many misconceptions about Scousers that make people not want to visit Liverpool, but I love this city and the people here so much.  They are just bonkers!  I mean, some of the slang here is hilarious - and embarrasingly, without even realising it, I am finding myself coming out with these words!!  Every time I meet up with my uni mates they tell me how Scouse I've become.  I don't hear it at all, mostly because I spend all day with true Scousers, but it must be rubbing off!!

Marking Madness

We've had a huge focus this term on ensuring that marking is of a good quality so that all the students are aware of what they need to do in order to improve.  Now I'm generally quite a detailed marker and I take my time to ensure that what I write is valuable to the students, but I've been having real issues with the marking for the kids who I teach who speak little or no English.  In lessons we scrape by with my poor translations and signs to tell them what we are doing and what I expect of them, but when it comes to their book work I am never sure what I can do that is going to be beneficial for them.

So this week I took a new tack and, with those students who speak no English at all, I tried my best to translate the marking into their home language.  Which was all fine with the kids from Eastern europe who speak Slavic languages and so have some very similar vocabulary to the Croats, but with the Chinese, Arabic, Greek and Russian students, who have a completely different alphabet for me to write in, I struggled.

Romanian Marking

I always feel that I don't want to let the EAL students down, as life is already difficult enough when you are stuck in a school where everyone is speaking a language that to you sounds as comprehensible as Gobbledegook!

Maybe it is going to be a case of learning to speak another 15 languages so that I can easily converse with these students in their home tongue and don't need to worry about this whole English malarky...or maybe I'm going to have to think up another way to give effective feedback to these kids!