Softball Tournament (Term 1, 2017)

 Today was the Tamaki cluster softball tournament, and my first sports tournament ever. I never played sports as a child, and this hasn't changed as I went into adulthood.

However, I wanted to make a conscious effort to go out of my comfort zone (read my goals for 2017 here). So I volunteered to coach the year 5 and 6 softball teams.

This has meant that for three weeks, I have had a softball training almost every lunchtime. This has been hard on me personally as I haven't been eating lunch properly and taking that break, making me more tired for the afternoon block of learning and also messes with my eating schedule.

I am glad I did sign up for it, as I have learnt a lot about the game of softball and of course have gotten to know my kids better as well.

My focus for the year 5 team was for them to learn how to play. I purposely made them rotate often through the various 'roles' in the team, even during the competition. I wanted them to build confidence in themselves and their physical ability, and the focus was about getting better, not being the best. This rotation was a focus for the year 6's as well, rather than them having 'set' roles in the team. This definitely did happen - every single child got better, wether at batting or catching
or pitching.

The next sport is cricket (starting next week!) and I am looking forward to learning more about the sport (ala, I know nothing..) and continuing to build strong relationships with my students through this extra activity.

Taking care of yourself

As today one of the only days I have where there is no meeting, training, orientation, classroom set up etc, I thought I would take advantage of that, and the good weather, and get outdoors.
One piece of advice given to the MDTA students in our orientation last week was to keep fit, and keep up your hobbies. This sounds obvious, a sort of 'be who you are' vague encouragement. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized how important it actually is. We are going to be so tired all the time, always having either classwork or university work to do, that we might just forget to prioritize ourselves.

Soo... I recreated a portion of our hike around the community last week and walked from my house, up, around, down Mt Wellington, and home again. Tell you what, I was sweeeatty.

Some more footage of my little walk as well as a sneak preview of my PRT card I finally received yesterday. Things are getting serious!

I had a great morning taking some time out for myself, lets hope I keep it up as things get busier!

Hi all!

Welcome to my blog. Here you will find my professional learning and development for the early years of my teaching career. I currently am a MDTA student, working at Tamaki Primary in East Auckland.

This is my MDTA cohort on our walk on Monday. We walked just over 14km around our community, seeing first hand where our children live and what they have around them.

It is a little overwhelming right now to see how much I have to do, with blogs, sites, Google+, class blog, PRT work etc etc. It will just a little while to get my head around it all :)