I've been doing one of my favourite things in Nursery today - supporting children re-enacting traditional tales. I spent the morning narrating performances of Goldilocks and the 3 Bears and the end of each session getting them to help retell The 3 Billy Goats Gruff.
It was such fun. Most of them had some idea of what they were supposed to say and delivered their lines with varying degrees of confidence. One little girl though literally lost the plot, in her enthusiasm for role playing Mummy Bear. She spend ages in the kitchen preparing breakfast and was most put out when, on cue, Daddy Bear said his porridge was "Too hot!" "Just eat it!" she told him, in a truly wife-like tone. "We have to go for a walk first!" he reminded her, trying to stick with the story. "Well, all right, but not until I've done the washing up!"

Here's my friend Jill saying "Hello" to her brand new first grandchild, young Dylan, born 23rd November. You will notice that when she got the call, she dropped everything and went hot foot to Stafford, not bothering to change out of her work uniform.

This is really for Kristin, to illustrate my message to her about the origins of Rick's curly hair. Exhibit one, back in 1972

The Uncle!

Moving along a couple of years, but not many, exhibit two

The Father!

And finally, some 20 years pass, and we have exhibit three

The Offspring!
I'll leave you to guess which is Rick....

and I've always loved this one. Happy Birthday for the 19th Kristin.

Every so often, to jolt us all out of our possibly boring rut, we have a Creativity Week at school, where we are supposed to deliver our usual curriculum with a certain slant and a bit of pizzazz.
This is Maths Creativity week. Of course, we in the Nursery like to think we are creative all the time, but we have gone the extra mile.
We have talk about Shape on our sticking table, with pre-cut 2D shapes for them to stick on 3D cartons, with a view to threading them on long and short strings later in the week.
We have 2 coloured playdough to encourage the making, sorting and counting of pretend cakes, with "birthday candles". Sandwich making in the cooking area involves number and shape talk, not to mention practical multiplication and sharing.
Outside we have had Big Boxes and Little Boxes, with lots of talk on size,shape and space as they crawl inside and see how many children they can squeeze in beside them.
We have cut long strips of plastic for them to weave in and out of the fence, talking about shape, pattern, direction and length as they go.
Tomorrow we plan to do some country dancing - four steps in, four steps out, doh-si-doh and all stand up again - and making patterns with walking through paint in Wellies.
New beads for pattern threading, "This old Man, He played 1" in Singing, and "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" in Storytime, have given Quiet Time a mathematical bent.
We are having great fun, and the children seem to be enjoying themselves too!

You probably thought that being a nursery teacher is an easy option, as far as pedagogical challenges go. OK, you thought, so you have to deal with the clingers, who transfer from Mum straight to you, and spend the next 3 months attached to your leg, sometimes crying. And then there's always the not quite toilet trained ones, so yes, there are the clothes to change. And you expect to have to teach 3 year olds to take turns and share -that's what they're here for, so sorting out all those things is par for the course. But then they go home at 3.20 and you follow at 4.00 when you've finished tidying, and planning for the next day, right? Because there's no marking of books with 3 year olds?
Aha! You were forgetting that we live in the Era of the Paper Trail - it's not what you can do, it's having the piece of paper that says so. And this, I'm afraid to say, is as true of 3 year olds as it is of 18 year olds.
A huge amount of time is taken up with assessments of the children.We have to constantly assess and have WRITTEN PROOF of where they are in the following areas: Disposition and attitude to learning, social skills, emotional independence and awareness; Language for communication and thinking, ability to link sounds to letters, reading, writing; awareness of Numbers as symbols and for counting, calculating and problem solving, awareness of shape, space and size; Knowledge of investigative and ICT skills, knowledge of the world around them, awareness of their own and others' culture and religion; Gross motor skills, fine motor skills; Creative use of art and craft materials, enjoyment and appreciation of music; and imagination and role play.
Which means observing the children as they play and writing down verbatim detail of what the child said and did, and making sure each of my 50 children has at least one observation written in each of those 18 areas, and hopefully several observations in key areas, like speaking and listening, and recognition of number symbols and counting skills, etc, by the end of next week to complete their base-line assessment.
And of course, it's not just making the original observation, you then have to write it down (on sticky labels) in intelligible form, then sort out all the labels you've written up into each child's individual ring binder, which has a page for each of the above areas, so the stickies can be put in the right place, in date order, preferably with examples of children's work and photographs.
There are 5 of us working with the children, and as they are completely free-flow, we obviously make obs on any child we have anything to do with, so I write them for Irene's 50 as well as mine, but when it comes to it, we are responsible for our own children, so I have to read everyone else's stickies as I put them in my files, to keep up with what's known about them.
That's what takes so long.
I did remember to say I love it, didn't I? Because I do.