I survived week 1, did you?

Has it really only been a week since I went back to work? My poor head is frazzled with all the information it's taken in (or at least, tried to take in) this week. 
New timetable, new subjects, new lesson structure and no bells! 18 classes, extended days, change of house and a new year 7 tutor group.
Normally I'd be grasping the new challenges with both hands but this year I have an even bigger challenge to overcome. Her name is Millie and she's 11 months old.
You see, this year's return to school has signified the end of my maternity leave and the start of Millie's new routine with the childminder. 
That also brought about my new daily worry and constant checking of my phone just in case there was a problem with her not settling. Of course there wasn't, in fact, she seems to have coped better with the new routine than I have.

My brain has decided to forget everything it once knew about teaching which has resulted in me sitting, silently staring at my laptop screen, trying to remember how to plan a lesson.

One of the first things my students used to say to me was "Miss, can we have a fun lesson?" 
It always provoked me to reply "Are you trying to imply that my lessons are not fun?"
Students would quickly respond "No, we just don't want to do anything boring"

This made me question "What makes a lesson fun from a students point of view?"

I kept this question in mind when planning my first lesson with year 9. I haven't seen them since they were in year 7 and I would be disillusioned to think that they'd still be full of energy and passion for German.
The topic of the lesson was body parts. "How can I make that fun?"

Over the summer I'd paid a visit to the local 99p store where I'd snapped up a random consortium of goodies, including some soft balls and squishy monsters. 
I decided that I'd introduce the body part vocabulary using mimes and then get the students to throw the objects to each other whilst testing themselves.

I was amazed at how keen they were to take part. Some students decided to invent their own rules and ways of testing each other. They even asked to sing "Head, shoulders, knees and toes in German" Of course, I happily obliged.

I was so impressed with their enthusiasm that I treated them to Bill Bailey's version of Das Hokey Cokey.

For their next lesson, I'll be using some more of my fab 99p purchases which include a dart board for a q&a game and fly swats for vocab swatting.

I now find myself constantly hunting for cheap items which can be used in my lessons. This weekend I purchased a pack of coloured lollipop sticks and some mini coloured pegs.
I intend to use them for literacy with each coloured item representing a different  grammatical element; such as nouns, verbs, adjectives etc.
Students will select three at random and then be challenged to construct a sentence.
I will report back on how it works in the lesson.

For those of you who are panic planning this Sunday evening, take a moment to remember that it is possible to create great lessons with minimum teacher input and if I can do it after a years break then so can you.