What sort of day have you had

Well done for today honey ! Good luck of tomorrow, will be thinking of you xxxx

Well yesterday was emotional as I attended my best school friends funeral but it was a lovely service and I was able to spend time with her family sharing happy memories .
She was 50 and died of a blood clot,really sad and her husband looked completly `lost` bless him .

Today I did my dyslexia training workshop assessment - no essay !! so I loved it !!!
Now working on a 3000 word piece about re telling traditional tales -love it !!!
Have a great weekend xxx

Linda is is so nice to hear about your learning journey and how you are progressing I can imagine the assessor having to interrupt you all and say stop now lol
I was going to text you yesterday but thought you could do without my sympathies as well, you were in my thoughts as were the family of your friend.

It has been another very busy week at work for me and I am loving it! We are being audited in a couple of weeks and this is worse than an OFSTED, so all hands deck to make sure everything is in order as you can imagine.

So much so that my boss has asked if I would come in on Monday my day off and look through learner files to make sure everything is in order. My head swelled as she said I know you will do it correctly and I need you. So off to work I go Monday.

Not bad to say I started working two days a week a year ago, went to three then four and looks like I will be moving to five!

This weekend will see me shopping for new clothes for congress which is in three weeks! Then finishing my CYPW planning No visiting this weekend.

I hope you all enjoy and not long till you break isn't it?

Cindy Im so pleased you are enjoying your job !!
Have just realised next week is my last official week in uni ! I have assignments to complete etc but I only have 1 assessment next wed 5-7pm and thats it! no more uni lectures or seminars .
It will seem odd not going any more .
This year full of worry has cost me 18K (TA salary plus student loan !)

I need to re submit a failed assignment by the end of june to graduate and I have my gcse English to complete and I also need a job lol
I have registared on every employment website going and have an interview for some supply work at the end of this month -I really need a fulltime post.
My oh wanted to know why I was going for TA posts - because they pay better than retail (retail =£6 pr hr if your lucky ) TA post £8- 9 pr hr


I

Aww what will you do with all the spare time you will have not having to travel back and forth??!!
Hubby's lol

I seriously need to find time to write my speeches for congress and keep putting it off. I may do them on the train on the way down as it is a five hour journey lol x

oh my after a horrendous week I can now relax and start typing my essay which is due on Thursday lunchtime. I am so tired

oh gosh Helen I really dont know how you can write essays so quickly ! I wish I had your determination .
I managed to pass my maths essay =phew ! not high marks but then I never get high marks and tbh im happy with a good pass .
Now just maths group problem solving task on wed and the dyslexia training workshop 700 words evaluation and 300 word planning outline Due next week and my re submision dyslexia piece the week after (well thats providing I pass the last one I submitted !! or i may just give up !!!)

Hope everyone is OK. Long day - don't know if any of you are involved with Y6 SATs anymore, but today was the reading paper. Actually it wasn't bad - the subject was Wolves, with a piece from The Jungle Book (very 'old' language) and various information texts - they were all pretty interested in it, and most had at least seen the good old Disney film! The questions were fair, there were just such a lot of them! The level 6 paper in the afternoon (too much pressure!) was also fair; it was about Triathlons - also a pretty good subject, not nearly as dry as some have been! Think most of ours have done OK.
Good luck tomorrow to anyone involved - it's the dreaded Grammar paper .................

which wasn't too bad was it. I wish the wolves one had been next years our year 5's have been doing a brill project on wolves and we did loads of lit work on original jungle book first ah well the way the cookie crumbles

Linda I had typed loads of notes so the actual writing of essay isnt too bad. didnt get too far yesterday but hope to have a shiny one finished tonight then just reference list tomorrow

Yes, I agree ... the grammar paper this morning was pretty good, think most of ours were fine with it. We had six kids doing the level 6 this afternoon; again, the grammar paper was very fair and the spellings OK (although none of ours had ever heard of some of the words, like 'plummet'), but I thought the half hour extended write was really tough. Could many of us produce a quality piece - cold - in 30 mins on 'The Best Things in Life are Free' ........ think I'd have trouble! They had a good go, but who knows - we have no idea of the mark scheme, or what the weighting is for spelling/grammar/writing ............ suspect the DfE have no idea either yet!!! We'll just have to wait and see!
Good luck with maths tomorrow x

Oh I am so out of the loop on yr6 SAT's my hubby mentioned this to me this morning and I was like..what? Spelling and grammar test??? So folks please explain this new test and so pleased that it is being done on one hand as we really need to teach spellings properly and widen children's vocab.

Cindy Im not in a school anymore but saw it on the news, from my understanding it is questions with sentences where there are missing verbs/adjectives/adverbs/etc and pupils have to insert the correct one.
It appears most people dont know nouns/verbs etc etc
Also there was this question

an example was Bob and ....... sat next to each other (I,me )

Im sure others on here will have all the details as this is only what I remember from the news yesterday !
I believe we really need our pupils to learn these as there are so many who havent a clue and its such an important part of our language that we seem to gloss over nowadays .

lms and mrsp - yes, that's basically what the grammar test is, but it does go into a lot of depth. I am old enough to have gone to a country grammar school where we had to do English Grammar every day for five years (plus Latin grammar!!!), so if you didn't absorb it in all that time, you were never going to - so I've been teaching Y6 this year. But it's given most of our teachers - who are in their 30s, like my kids, and just weren't taught it at school - a complete nightmare. There have been grammar courses for teachers all over the country to bring them up to speed.
The test involves things like identifying main and subordinate clauses, definite and indefinite articles, modal verbs, using semi-colons correctly ............. and the level 6 paper moves onto stuff like fronted adverbials and determiners (which I did have to look up)! There's also a spelling paper with it (like the old one used to be) and a short writing test for level 6 - not marked on creativity, just spelling, sentence and text construction, and grammar.
Because it was all so new, we crammed all the learning in to Year 6 this year, but it will have to change the way we teach Literacy throughout KS1 and 2. I don't want to imply that no-one has been teaching grammar or sentence construction - of course we have - but we need to start using the technical language and really focusing on it. If anyone else is involved in teaching grammar, Pie Corbett has some brilliant ideas on his website for making it fun - I've used loads of the games.
If you're really feeling nerdy and want a look, you can google 'sample KS2 grammar paper' - last year's paper can be downloaded.
I agree with you, I do think it's important to learn how to spell and construct writing - but who knows how long this scheme will last. The next lot in power might well say that as we now have spell checkers and grammar checkers - does it really matter any more?
Don't mean to sound cynical, but we are certainly turning another full circle - all good fun!

Totally agree with you Gracie, spinning around again. Dear Mr Gove is back in his Grammar school days! We teach it automatically, now have to emphasise it xx

have to laugh the instructions for this test were children are not allowed to use any sort of dictionary. For a spelling and grammar test what a surprise.

Oh I agree back in my day we were taught grammar all the time and how to speak properly, which made sentence construction easier.

I have been teaching modal verbs to my adult learners and they were shocked, proper and common nouns also was one they didn't know. It is all down to vocab used in the classrooms, stop using add a describing word and tell them it is an adjective. By the time they get to me they haven't a clue! As for asking for verb or adverb examples it is a nightmare.

In these days of social media and texting we need to teach children how to speak and spell properly ready for applying for jobs etc. (rant over lol)

Pmsl laughing Helen, but you can bet someone somewhere has asked 'are they allowed to use a dictionary?'

Maths paper. Work out the angle. Do not use a protractor!! "Miss how do I do that!" "Stupid people why give you the bloody thing if you can't use it! Totally agree lol

Hufflepup - you are so right! We went right through the paper at 7.15 in the morning and decided not to even give ours a protractor - why confuse them, when they didn't need it for anything??? Thought the L 3-5 maths papers were pretty fair, but the level 6s were hard. Especially so because the kids (6 of them) had to do both papers on Thursday afternoon, after doing the L 3-5 calculator paper with everyone else in the morning. The last paper was the L6 calculator paper, which they didn't get to start until 2.30 - by then they were shattered! It's not fair, they are only kids - not sure how they will have done.
We celebrated the end of SATs yesterday afternoon with Domino's pizza - kids couldn't believe their luck! Actually, it was a very good deal - it was BOGOF anyway, but when I rang to order and said what it was for, they said if someone could come down and collect them, if we bought five pizzas, they would give us twelve!!!! So we had a mountain of pizza, but they got through it, no problem.
Hope everyone has a good weekend x

Gosh Grace you were lucky ! Our papers are locked away till the 5 minutes before the start of each exam when the HT brings the sealed boxes in and then collects them afterwards. .. No one gets a sight of the paper till the actual exam lol I agree all the papers were fair, but I thought 30 mins for the two level 6 maths was a bit much ..especially as it was in the afternoon we had 25/70 doing the maths and 20/70 doing the literacy. We did a science SAT on Friday. ,! ! Set b the school it was an odpaperfrom 2007 , which actually I thought was harder than the2012 paper lol

We are short on space and so have to do the papers in two sittings, so that the kids are not too close together - so the first lot came in to school early, otherwise we just couldn't have fitted it all in. You are allowed to open the papers one hour before you start - hence the 7.15. Don't really know if it's a good idea though - just makes you worry about it more! You had lots doing the level 6! All over now for another year .... time to start planning Year 6's end of year production!

Yep , same here! Auditions on Monday lol

We sit majority of children in school hall ..those with readers are in year 6 area HT supervises the second area

Soooo glad I don't have the stress of SAT's anymore and watching the kids struggle. I can sit my learners when I feel they are ready and it is much better for me and them. Though some never feel they are ready lol

I will be having another batch of learners sitting tests second/third week in June and then lots of speaking and listening presentations, to film and type up their assessments. We have direct claim so my word is law (oh the power!!)

Absolutely loving my job, though some days are better than others as there is lots of paper work that goes with it besides the usual planning etc. CYPW tutorial on Wednesday afternoon, I am hoping I can get three of my learners passed by end of July before the funding criteria changes and they can progress to level 3!

Enjoy the sunshine folks, I will think of you whilst I am sat in a pub garden tomorrow while you all are back at work. No doubt you will all rub it in when you break at the end of the week and I am still plodding on x

Glad your job is going well, lms. Hope you are all enjoying the sunshine today - oh is at a local cup final, so I decided to abandon the idea of cooking today and went for a long walk, picking up dinner at the farmer's market on the way back. This is the life! Back to reality tomorrow. Have a good week, folks x

Thanks Gracie. Sounds like you had a lovely day out.

Not as warm today so didn't make it to the pub garden but we still went for lunch. Nice to relax a little longer. Back to the grindstone tomorrow