Unable to harvest the potato crop on the longest, wettest most miserable midsummer’s day- I have taken the liberty of harvesting the crop after school is out for Summer.
The tatties registered 1.25kg on my kitchen scales and as there is no school we shall have them for tea. The orchard is looking fantastic and the new seating is brilliant. I especially like the toadstool seats! It looks like there will be a bumper apple crop this year after the poor showing last year.

I have started a new blog for my new job. Check out “Country comes to town” to see what I get up to in the coming months.

Well that’s it. 22 years and I still haven’t put on a production of The Sound of Music.

The sun shone as the orienteering teams from all the Cowal schools took part in the annual competition arranged by our PE specialist Fiona McLean. Tighnabruaich won the event so well done.
A big thanks to all the staff who helped me enjoy a night out at The Whistlefield Inn. I shall return for the garden party on the 21st when we will harvest our potato crop.

Monday is D-day! A new beginning and I hope to have my new blog up and running to keep you up to date with events at my new school. I managed not to cry in front of the children, but it all seems a bit surreal. One of my leaving presents is an alarm clock..now why they think I will need that….

Anyway- my car is full of stuff, accumulated over the years. Good luck to Ellen with the continuation of this blog. Always knew she was a wee blogger.

Over at Talking Teds it has gone a bit quiet- blogger has been down the last couple of times I have tried to post stuff so hopefully this weekend.

Shinty needs a mention- Kyles beat Inveraray and are through to the next round of the Camanachd Cup. Kyles Juniors are through to the next round of the Sutherland Cup. If you want to see Kyles v Bute this Saturday come to Glendaruel Shinty Field at 2:30 as they contest the semi-final of the Celtic Cup. Cowal and Bute Ladies Shinty team are providing a BBQ as a fundraiser- see you there.

This is Ellen signing in for the first time- fingers crossed not for the last!

I am handing over the reigns of this blog to my colleague in P5/6/7 at the end of the week. Ellen will bravely continue the blog and once she has mastered its use she will get the children in the upper school blogging too. I will of course support as much as I can to get things going.

After school today we had a short session on the IWB. On cue some of the problems I have encountered happened. The board would not calibrate….then it would not work with the pen…….then the laptop froze (now that hasn’t happened before). So it turned into a troubleshooting session. Eventually it all worked and so to blogging. I can change the comment moderator in the settings so that Ellen receives the e-mails about new comments. I am considering trying a different blog provider for the new blog but have not decided as yet.

Need to look at the SSDN mentor pack. I would hope that all the work we have done as Masterclassers will prove sufficient to fulfill the criteria for becoming an SSDN mentor. At the Masterclass conference we were told our folios were very impressive. It is good to receive recognition for the undoubted time and effort that has been the way of Masterclass. As most of us agreed, time was the biggest commitment and I suspect SSDN mentoring will be the same. Mary Hallan of East Renfrewshire commented on a previous posting that she was selected by her authority to be an SSDN mentor on the strength of her work as a Masterclasser and INSET provider.

Tomorrow I am going to send off the completed article for the CalMac magazine written by two of my P3’s. I shall also post it on the blog and am sending a copy to the local paper as well. I will also present certificates to the children to celebrate their contribution to the Talking Teddies project. Marlyn has been off work this week- get well soon Mrs Moffat- your bloggers need you!

Today was the start of my last week at Tighnabruaich Primary school. The weather is glorious and the children have all been working hard. I have been at the school for 22 years, over half of my life. I will take up my new post at Dunoon Primary next Monday- an exciting new adventure in my teaching career will begin.
I don’t think it will really sink in for a while that I have made the move, but I am sure that as I meet all the new pupils and staff and begin to get to know my way around the school, a new blog will have to be devised. There will be an IWB in my classroom- there is one other in the school at present. Don’t know much else about the ICT provision except that there is a classroom in a box as well as some computers in the library which are PC’s I think. Lots to find out about and new title for a blog to devise..Dunoon Diary…….Dunoon Daily……mmmmm..Dunno??
Any suggestions?

Today I mentioned SSDN to the children as the next exciting thing happening with ICT. I did my best to explain a little about what it would be like, the Scottish Schools Digital network.
‘There will be a giant website with lots of amazing things to see and do. Think of some of the great things we have seen on the BBC website and games we have played on poissonrouge.com.” They listened intently….. “there will be a single sign on to access everything,’ I said. “one user name and password and that’s it” Now I was talking their language. Thank goodness for that I heard someone say. My class are obsessed with knowing passwords and usernames. They proudly announce the password for signing on the blog and are pretty miffed that I won’t reveal my internet access password! Funny the things that bother them.

They were desperate to see the flags of the visitors to my blog and pretty impressed that I had a new country that had not looked at theirs. They have now seen the Vietnamese flag and found it in Kidspiration.

Owen and Samuel are completing their article for the CalMac magazine about the teddy project and will e-mail it next week. I shall post it on the Teddy blog as well as they have worked really hard on it.

At last I have had over a 1000 hits on my blog! The children have been wondering when I would reach that number as their total on the Teddy blog is now over 1500!

I’m catching up boys and girls.

Following on from our very successful day out at A’Chleit beach on Kintyre and the meeting up of the two classes for a wonderful teddy bears picnic, the buzz just keeps going. On Monday all the children wrote a report on their day out. To enable the children to complete their writing we used our normal maths time as well…bit of flexibility!

Marlyn and I met up at Inveraray on Monday evening. We need to collate nd organise all the material the children have produced for the blog in preparation for our seminar presentation at SETT in September. LTScotland are providing accommodation for our stay in Glasgow. Both Marlyn and I are hoping to become SSDN mentors for Argyll and Bute and on Tuesday attended the final Masterclass conference where Neil Stewart from RM spoke to us about SSDN in detail.

In order to attend the P1 induction meeting for parents at Dunoon Primary, I had to leave early so missed most of the SSDN content and discussion. Marlyn of course, Skyped me later and filled me in on what I had missed. I spent an interesting afternoon at Dunoon Primary and faced a larger than I am used to audience of parents, whose youngsters are starting their school adventure for the first time. Survived that and I even remembered quite a few people’s names!

Today the children have been typing short messages for the blog. We were able to post a few in school and will add more tomorrow. Technical hitches first thing. We have returned the borrowed whiteboard to Mr Brown- but do not worry- we wheeled the new board into the classroom and rearranged things to fit (this is a bigger board). I then had to reinstall all the Promethean software as it just would not work…aarrrgghhh. Back on track after playtime having spent the break reinstalling it all.

This is how our display is coming on in the classroom. After checking the sitemeter on the blog and the Clustermap we found more hits from around the world. The children added star labels to our world map. We then used Kidspiration displayed on the interactive whiteboard to bring up the flags we needed. The children then volunteered which flags they would make and in pairs began their tasks. They all did incredibly well- the paint was flowing and with a little artistic licence the flag factory was up and running. They added stars and emblems afterwards using sticky paper cut to shape and are very proud of their display. We have devised a quiz where all the names of the countries are on labels(created in Kidspiration by Owen and Samuel), which have to be matched to the correct flag- then find the country on the globe or world map.
Next week we are going to do a little research on each country and find out some facts-population, language spoken etc. For this we shall of course make use of the internet.

I have also been busy this week writing a case study for Digital Survey on behalf of LTScotland. I have written up my experiences of using Kidspiration which may be published. I shall let you know where and when it will be made available.

Teddy Bear Picnic is on Friday- weather forecast is not great. Today we practised singing the teddy bears picnic song using a midi-file as our accompaniment. What a difficult song to sing but we did our best-especially the speed at which the midi file went-hardly time to draw breath.