So thoughts are turning to the new term and I am genuinely excited. Tomorrow evening I may feel differently!?!?

We have a new member of staff joining the department who will be responsible for numeracy, which means together with myself, Seager, Will (who is also teaching his Science specialism) and two Assistant Heads we are at full strength.

We also have a PGCE student joining us for 6 weeks and deciding which classes to allocate has been, let’s just say tricky. It didn’t seem fair to allocate any of our newbies groups, as she needs to build relationships herself and Will is still getting to grips with teaching maths so the groups he is getting are all mine – years 7, 9 and 10. Reflecting on this, it’s comforting that I now feel confident enough with them to let anyone loose with them – they are all up for it and will be on their best behaviour! (so they say!)

This morning I’ve had data coming out of my “ying yang” as I’m part way through putting together matrices for each teacher to have in their class packs (I’ll explain more about those when I’m done!) and I’m starting to plan lessons too.

I’ve also been putting together more Bread and Butter (B&B) worksheets (you will find some of them here -> Bread & Butter Worksheets) for my years 9, 10 and our year 11 “supergroup” (I’ve been meaning to put something together about that too … I promise I will this week!).The B&B worksheets are working really well with the groups above and I’ve done some for key stage 3 (here-> Bread & Butter Worksheets for Key Stage 3) but haven’t yet started using them as we are doing paper versions of TimesTable Rockstars (check it out here -> TTRockstars) which will carry on until Easter and then we’ll move to B&B. This got me thinking a couple of weeks ago about putting together some B&B for the top end of year 11, so I put a shout out on Twitter for topic ideas and I’ve put a plan together of the topics that I’ll include. Guess what I’ll be doing this week .. yep! Putting these together ready for our set 1/2 teachers to use when we make the set changes in a couple of weeks – this will be the final set changes in the lead up to the final exams.

Hope the below makes sense: The idea is that there will be 7 or 8 topics on each sheet (3 a week) that keep these topics fresh. I’ve put in the progression that I’ll add in over a period of time … I have included some lower grade topics but I want to make sure they get that “little but often practice” for these too. Apologies for my scrawl but it’s the way my mind works.

If you think I may have missed anything leave a comment below.