Teaching in the UK

Well it has been a minute, hasn't it? Almost 3 years actually. I took a leap back in 2018 and moved my life over to the UK to teach for 2 years. It was an amazing adventure and one I will never forget.
I had the privilege of working at two primary schools in England - one in London and one about 2 hours north of London. I had two very different experiences but learnt a lot from both. I'm going to make a few posts here about some things I did in the classroom.
In the UK their school year begins in September and goes through to July and they have 3 school terms throughout the year. My favourite part was the half term break. Every 6ish weeks everyone would get a 1 week break. Then at full terms we would get 2 weeks off. It broke the terms up and everyone appreciated it! I'm not sure how I'll go getting used to 9-13 weeks straight now that I'm back in Australia.
My first full term we had an African theme and all our learning was centred around this. We created our learning space to reflect the theme and to engage the children from the first day they stepped into the classroom.

As our 'stunning start' the children walked into the classroom to discover a cheeky monkey had broken in and would not climb down from the hanging wires.

The children had to find a way to convince the monkey to come down so that we could learn more about him and where he came from.

Some tried to coax him down with bananas and others thought he may be stuck so attempted to build ladders to help him down.

'Please monkey come down or I'll give you 1 banana.'

Eventually he climbed down and told us he was from Africa, lost and missed his family very much. We had to investigate monkeys and apes to find out what he was and help him get home.