First Day Monday 3 February 2014
All this happened on the first day of school. The blackboard was cluttered with work, student computer files were cleaned up and empty, walls displayed learning instructions and the teacher’s desk was overflowing with documented new ideas to try during the course of the day.

Home reading books were available in separate boxes for the reading groups. My instructions were to get a book from the appropriate box and read it before storing it into their book bag.
I can distinctly remember saying, “Don’t forget to open the book and begin by reading the first page.”
The classroom was silent, many had completed their book, and some had even moved on to the next reading activity.
But one little girl was still on the front page of her home reading book.
As I approached she gently asked, “Can we turn to the second page now?”

I sat in the comfortable, padded teacher chair to begin teacher reading. From 11am to 11.10am the teacher is timetabled to read a story to the class while the children sit on the mat and eat their play lunch.
I had warned the children that the seat was so comfortable that I could fall asleep while sitting in the chair in an instant.
I began reading, and within ten seconds I had pretended to nod off, head drooping forward and book falling to my lap.
Not expecting this, the children had remained silent, watching and waiting.
Bless them.
They had allowed their teacher some much sought after repose.

The spelling exercise for the day, while working with partners, was to substitute initial consonant letters from a chosen word. The word ‘big’ was to have its initial consonant changed by providing three new words. So some examples could be ‘jig’ and ‘fig’.
After another teacher explanation, a female pupil, who had asked what needed to be done to complete this exercise, responded with enthusiasm.
“Thank you. Pig,” was an appropriate word she derived from ‘big’ after thanking me.
“Thanks, but I prefer to be called Mr Chittenden,” I replied resulting in a querulous look from our student.

Borrowing pencils. Many of the class were without pens or pencils on the first day. When doing written work we decided to ask those who had a supply of writing utensils to share them; red pens, blue pens, felt tips, crayons. The mathematics activity timetabled for the day was a Knowledge Test Stage 4. It was the most colourful maths assessments I have ever had the pleasure of marking.

As part of our Behaviour Plan, the class had discussed some suitable rules to use for a safe environment, consequences if the rules are not adhered to, and rewards based on a point system.
The children elected to play dodge ball as their first reward when they had gathered the appropriate number of points.
The total number of points they needed to gain was 16.
By the end of the day the class had gathered 8 points. One student noted we had 50% of our points already.
Maths should be easy in this context.

It was a great first day in Room 5.