School Christmas Chaos

3 days left at school until the Christmas holidays. It's hard to work with those who are on a continual high (and I'm talking about the staff here). Last night was the annual 'do' at a local pub. Every year, people have a few drinks and get creative. Hacked-off waitresses are left to deal with nativity scenes made of ripped up crackers and drinking straws. One of the TAs does her famous napkin trick (I'm not going into details - the blog gets blocked by Google if I add adult content), and sly photos get taken which are hastily deleted from Facebook.

This lunchtime, it was the children's turn. They sat in the school hall while staff and governors served them their Christmas dinners. It was noisy. Some clever person had bought crackers with whistles inside. Well, that won't happen again - lesson learnt there...So we served them turkey, sausages and veg followed by ice cream. After gravy was spilt, roast potatoes shot across tables, and children stole each others ice cream, we scraped all the veg in the bin and sent the children out for an extra long break-time.

You can guess that our school Christmas tree

 looks nothing like this...

Next was my favourite bit - carols around the Christmas tree. We did the tear-jerkers like Away in a Manger, and Little Donkey. We did the irritatingly happy-clappy ones like Mary Had a Baby. Ms Fab had secretly taught the year 5's and 6's extra words to Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer, which looks set to become a new school tradition. Then it was The 12 days of Christmas, which we make ultra complicated by making the girls and boys sing different bits, that they have to stand up and sit down to. The children are brilliant - it's the adults who are rubbish and get dreadfully mixed up. To finish, and to wind the children up nicely before we sent them out to their parents, we did Jingle Bells, with added jingle and shouty bits. 

Over the next couple of days there are class Christmas parties, where the children will 'play games' (argue over who won at Pass the Parcel) and eat (until they're sick). The standard of party dress depends on which class you go in. Reception children are in jeans (boys) and princess dresses (hopefully just the girls). Infants are in jeans (boys) and leggings with Christmas jumpers (girls). Juniors are in jeans (boys and some girls) or tiny skirts (the rest, who get very cold at break-times).

And then we have Friday, when the children get another long dinner-break so the staff can do their 'Secret Santa'. We have to sit in the staff room and, one by one, open our pressies. 'Oh, that's lovely!' we hopefully get to say. I'll let you know if mine is lovely, or if I get another weird hat-thing. Gulp.