The New Year’s Party was far more disruptive to the bedtime schedule than I expected. We’re now 4 bedtimes later and the kids are still having trouble going to sleep on time. Prior to the night of staying up until 1 am they had been waking up before 8 am. Afterward they all want to sleep in until 9 or later with an accompanying delay on going to sleep. I’m fairly certain that the disruption would have been resolved more quickly if I had dragged them out of bed on schedule during the past four days, but I didn’t really want to get up early either. Oh well. School starts tomorrow and that will forcibly revert all of us into being early risers. This does not put me off having parties at the house, but I’ll be sure to go through the hassle of enforcing a bedtime on the kids at a more reasonable hour. And I’ll be more diligent about getting people back on schedule.
I am going to enjoy teaching my new primary class. They’re all 4 which means I’m allowed to hand out snacks and lessons are very simple. We cover about lesson points about three times each during the course of 45 minutes. In between the lesson points, the kids eat, do a craft, and play. It is much more relaxed than my last class where I worked hard to get 10 year olds to comprehend a more substantive lesson. Unfortunately being in the large group sharing time at the same hour as Patch meant that he attached himself to me like a little barnacle. I’m still trying to decide if that is a problem and if it is, how I’m going to go about addressing it. Also this year Gleek moved up into the older sharing time group. This means that instead of having her fidgets camouflaged by dozens of younger fidgeters, she now sticks out. She also has a new teacher, who I think will be great for her, but we now need to figure out a new set of expectations and then figure out how to help Gleek to comply. She ended up fleeing the meeting to come and find me. I’m still trying to figure out the shape of the challenge and I’m trying to figure out how I want to handle it. Fortunately there is fantastic group of teachers who are willing to help, I just need to figure out what shape the help needs to take. I’m too tired to solve it today. More thought is required.
Primary changes are inevitable. In my case, I’ve been released from teaching the 11 year olds after a 6 year run. Of course, it’s a matter of sadness at leaving but happy to try something different. Going to Gospel Doctrine was weird though, haven’t done that in years… I forgot what a quiet class was.
How’s Gleek with challenges, mental or physical? She sounds to me from what I’ve read of what you’ve said (if that makes sense, it’s late) erm, that she’s very bright and finds such work as she’s given easy and then gets bored. Dunno if that’s a correct reading of the situation, but if it’s not wide of the mark, can you find ways to accelerate her learning to a point where it needs some (not too much) work, and actually gives her something to get her teeth into, so to speak.
I speak as one who got into trouble at school, age 5, for refusign to read my reading books. Point was, in my case, I’d reasd them about 18 months ago, and they were boring. At that time I was on “Swallows and Amazons”, and over the next year or two I read the whole series. Although a bit dated now, they’re fantastic childrens novels. I must get around to locating them and re-reading them…
Oh yeah, meant to say: You’re right about the bedtime/get up time thing. Firts day back at school there will be much tiredness and crankiness, but it’ll reset the clocks. I guess the optimal thing would be to phase getting up at “normal” time back in gradually over a few days. I don’t think it does kids any harm to stay up really late sometimes, when there’s no need to be up early the next day.
Six years is a long time to be a primary teacher. You must have more endurance that I do. I burn out after a year or two. I’m willing to take it up again after a break, but I don’t know that I could keep going without one.