working hard

we've had 6 days with the new children at work (and 3 of those days were just small groups of 10-14 children, the last 3 were groups of 22-25). it's gonna be a hard year. we have several children with difficult behaviours, a few that have very little english, a few that have never been in any kind of child care and some special needs. fortunately our new team in our room is quite good (3 of the 5 in our room have either switched to the other room because they needed to work less hours or moved onto another job, they have been replaced by 2 new full time people who fit in perfectly). since wednesday when we started doing the full groups i've spent most of my day (including rest time which usually just involves moving around the room sitting with children, patting them while they--and i--get to rest) running from one issue to another. it takes me several minutes to write a 2 sentence note in our diary for my co-workers because every half word i have to jump across the room to stop a child from biting someone, throwing things, grabbing things...... (and there are 1 or 2 other staff in the room also supervising and dealing with those issues at the same time). once the ones who are doing these things (and its not all of them, we've got some really sweet kids in the group too) learn it's not ok and they aren't going to get away with it at kinder it'll be better. it'll also be better when they know the routine and can do most things on their own (like putting their belongings in the right places and making their own beds at rest time). february is just going to have very long days (and lots of glasses of wine after work).