The New School Year

      The New Beginning   2013-14                                                                    

I love this time of year the planning, the organization of the course, the setting of objectives and deciding what's important and what needs to be done.  The kids are ready for a new start, we're all refreshed after a long summer holiday.
Even the teachers are smiling at each other.  We haven't started irritating each other just yet.

The meetings actually seem to be productive and there's a feeling of energy a buzz around the school.
Long may it last!The parents meeting today seemed to go well and parents were looking reasonably happy and asked sensible questions.
 I always get butterflies in my stomach before these meeting even after so many years.  It's a bit like being on the stage.  You can see that you are being judged,  it's completely understandable but makes you feel nervous.
I finally managed to recover my  index so visitors to the blog can actually find the posts for their class.  It only took me about 5 days.

So this year I plan to lead my students(108 of them) to learning and hopefully motivate them along the way.  The official formative assessment is slowly dying but it still has some followers among us.  Unfortunately these followers tend to be in the echelon of the Education department in our local authority.  So there will have to be some formative testing done but the bulk of the evaluation carried out in my class will be from The higher order thinking skills with a lot of emphasis on  (self evaluation and peer evaluation), measurable, specific objectives that children understand.
This ancient chinese proverb got it right.

 Chinese proverb : Teachers open the door. You enter by yourself.

I also want to use Excel to show, compare and contrast results and move away from my scruffy old notebook.

So good luck to everyone and hopefully this is going to be a great academic year.