FEELINGS
Time spent by a teacher on different literacy-related activities
“The thing that I get the most satisfaction or I enjoy the most is generating ideas and then whole class teaching so it's all about the teaching and being with the children. I put that not as high as this one because you can get some really rotten experiences when you teach as well so, although the highs would obviously outweigh that, on the whole I've got that there.[…] Then marking I put as halfway because I think this is a bit like your comment, when it's an amazing piece of writing it's the best feeling ever but then also if a child completely didn't get it and just drifted off you think, 'Oh gosh, you're capable of so much more,' so it's like the frustration of the grey and not happiness combined with the red where you just think, 'Wow', you know, because that's obviously a real buzz.”
Inspired by a whole school week on the theme of the 'Lost Words' book
“We did poems, we did incantations, we even did Father's Day cards based around it. So the trunk is showing you what we created in Year 6 and then at the top of the tree, the branches, is the whole school output. So across school we saw some visual literacy going on, nursery children taking photos with iPads, we've got some poetry, lots of forest school work outside, writing, lots and lots of art and design and technology being done across the school. So all of this inspired by one book and then being taken across by the school. We tried to put some measure in to it is the size of my acorns, the different feels that you got, so you see the biggest one is the feeling of pride of seeing the library, how it looks now that we've transformed it with the children's work, seeing the art work that was taking place across school.”
Discussing literacy
‘Then I've got a cherry at the top of my cake and that's because it was a colleague who actually videoed them reading their stories and he said I couldn't believe how good the stories were and the vocabulary they were using.'
‘That's such a nice feeling isn't it?’
‘It is, because it does happen very often, does it?’
‘You feel really proud.'
‘Hmmm, it's not often. Everybody's so busy it's not often somebody says, 'That was great, those stories were great and the vocabulary they used, and they were really enthusiastic.’
Feelings associated with different activities in which a teacher is involved
“I think I tried to make it a general feeling because it applied to so many different bits, so satisfaction with planning but then the joy of watching the children, particularly in this guided reading session which I feel is the one that's gone really well this week, of how they engaged with the discussion and got so much out of it. We were doing a fiction piece linked to our topic and at least six of them have gone to read the whole book from the extract. I'm like, yes, this is what we should be doing, inspiring.”
Representing the different aspects of English teaching and literacy
“I did the feedback as the fog, the smoke, the smog coming out the back of the tractor purely because it's sort of a bi-product, because obviously you put everything in and then the children create this wonderful thing and then, like yourself, you have to feel the need to then unpick it all and for some children it's something they're really proud of and then you're sitting there unpicking it going, well, there's no full stops in that, you've missed out this but, again, it kind of disappears off in to the ether.”