Dragon Happenings

Been a bit quiet on here lately but things have been really busy with school and moving house and I've not had a huge amount to say really. Classroom is now finally all set up properly, displays of children's work etc. are all up. People keep saying how lovely my classroom looks which is really nice to hear, will take a few photos to update on here tomorrow.

My school works to a creative curriculum so the majority of my teaching is all based on a theme - Turrets and Tiaras. So that's all things castles, dragons, princes, princesses and the like. I have to say this week has completely convinced me that a creative curriculum is worth while. We kicked off with a trip to Warwick Castle and have been doing some information writing all about castles but things got really exciting last week when we found a mysterious egg in our classroom on Monday morning!

Of course I knew absolutely nothing about the egg or where it came from... I HADN'T made it from paper mache the day before and only finished painting it that morning... The kids absolutely loved it and got so excited about it, though I did have to spend about 5 minutes convincing one boy that I hadn't made it because I don't know how to paper mache though his response was that of course I know how because I'm a grown up. We didn't know what the egg was, where it came from, how it got there and so we had a morning of brainstorming different ideas. Here they are...

As you can see, I have some lively imaginations in my class, though I think the best ideas were ones that we shared verbally rather than wrote down. I think my favourite idea was that a volcano must have erupted somewhere and that the egg was resting inside to keep warm and got blown in the air when the volcano erupted, it flew all the way over here and landed in our classroom, coming in through the window. It was a really good activity to do because it got them thinking and coming up with ideas but also reasons why. Anytime they shared an idea they had to say 'I think... because...' and not just 'I think'. 

So we looked after the egg, making sure that we kept it warm, dry and safe. On Thursday morning we went off to assembly and came back to find this...

 

The egg was gone! It was time to do some detective work. There were footprints, from that we decided that the egg must have cracked and then whatever it was climbed up onto our storage unit and stood in the paint, then it jumped from table to table and went out into the corridor. I must have forgotten to shut the door and it went outside. There were no footprints outside so we knew it was something that could fly. There was also some burnt paper on the table, that's when we knew it was a dragon because nothing else breathes fire! The children were so ridiculously excited but so disappointed that the egg and dragon were gone.

We spent the next few days writing a care guide all about how to look after a dragon in case anyone finds it or it comes back. This morning I shared a very exciting news report that I 'saw on the news last night'....

The kids of course went absolutely crazy with excitement! They came up with all kinds of fantastic theories. I explained that the news station wanted us to write some newspaper articles about what happened and suddenly they all thought they were going to become famous! We spent the entire morning working on these newspaper articles and I have to say, they're absolutely fantastic. There are some of the children that I've really struggled to get decent work out of since I started and some of those children did some absolutely amazing work today and they worked mostly independently. It really seemed to grab the interest of the boys, going to really milk this over the next couple of weeks before half term! If I had any doubts about a creative curriculum, they're gone now. I love my job, teaching is the best job in the world!