Working In My Classroom

Today I started working in my classroom, and thist is what I walked into find:








So after about 3 and a half hours of work, it has turned into this:




I am not near done. Still have all my boxes to unpack, stuff to clean and then the best part DECORATE!! But I got a lot of work done today and will accomplish more tomorrow!! :-) I do feel better that I have started on my room.

Folder Games

So several days ago my mom and I figured out that Mardel's was having a 20% off sale. This is good news for a newish teacher. Well heck a sale is good for any teacher. Have you seen our paychecks? Well anyways....mom and I went and found a ton of good stuff. Mostly we found teacher books. But these arnt your normal teacher books filled with worksheets and reproducibles. No, these are books of folder games. And these books are awesome! They have so many games that hit so many good points for the things Im going to be teaching this year. So the next several days are going to be full of cutting and gluing these folder games together. And by days, I mean DAYSSSSSSSSSSSSSS. I got 5 books full of folder games, 4 of the books have 10 games each and the last one has 16. So thats a total of 56 folder games. I know its going to be a lot of hard work now, but later this year its going to be so much easier when I am not searching the internet on sunday nights trying to figure out what my kids are going to do in centers that next week! I am going to have so much going on this fall that hopefully these resources are going to make my life easier! I also got a book called "Alternatives to Worksheets". It has some pretty cool "hands on" activities that can be used for anything you are teaching. I'm looking forward to being able to put all these things to use this year!

Also, I got to get my stacks of papers filed from this past year. All those things (aka lesson plans, worksheets, activities and such) that I had let pile up over the school year, I got folders and filed it all. This will also hopefully help me this next year! :-)

I had to go to school to get the box full of papers that had to be filed and got to see in my new rooms. It is a MESS. Everything is not even close to were I put it. I will hopefully start in on my room next week. I want to spend the rest of this week making the folder games and then next week I can take it all up to school and get going in my room. It is going to take a lot of work! I will post pics along the way! Hopefully this year my room will be more ready for the beginning of school then it was last year. My poor kids, I hope they make it in 3rd grade! I pray for them! :-)

End of Subbing

Well I am glad I got the opportunity to sub. It let me see that aspect of teaching from another point of view. I now know how important it is to make sure that when leaving plans for a sub, you make sure that all the supplies the class or sub will need is easy to get to or find. Each day I was there, I had to run across or down the hall for some sort of supply. Not that it was that big of a deal, it was just the fact that I had to leave my class alone, and go find what I/we needed. During the school year, I left my kids several times in the room alone. I mean when you need a bathroom break, you need one. But leaving kids that were not in my classroom all year alone bothered me. I dont know these kids. It was scary to leave them alone, so needless to say my sub plans will be checked about 100 times before I leave that day. Also, I need to make a good sub folder. Something that has got some good lessons in it if there ever is an emergency....guess I better get thinking on that!