Floating or sinking?

So I'm loving the teaching I'm doing, but absolutely hating the paperwork.

I had another observation today (apparently I was satisfactory/competent, which I'm embarrassed to say is better than last time round) and found out that I have, as I suspected, been missing some of the out-of-school work I'm supposed to be doing. It's not actually much (just a weekly evaluation sheet), but it's yet another fairly pointless document that I'm not really sure how to fill in. I've just started growling at it,* so I decided to write a bit of blog instead.

Floating and sinking in the water tray went well today. We provided a range of brightly coloured materials in addition to the usual ducks, jugs, bowls, foam shapes, etc, and asked all kinds of challenging questions. There were a few alarming comments (a solemn "If you sink you drown" was followed by another lad's "I've drowned three times!") but the concept was fairly well understood, and there were some nice attempts to make floating objects sink (dropping stones onto a piece of tin foil) and vice versa (impromptu boats included a wooden spoon and a strange confection of feathers and pipe cleaners - which I'm sorry to say was not as effective as its diminutive creator might have hoped). The plan is to expand that tomorrow by specifically requesting boats and challenging the children to get them (loaded with the penguin) from one end of the water tray to the other without touching them.

The way things are going at the moment, boat-building materials are likely to include several screwed up weekly evaluation sheets...

* Yes, literally.