Almost there!

Just an update on the classroom situation: I THINK I almost have it all the way how I want it.


I usually spend 3 to 6 hours at school most days getting things moved and gone through. And a lot of those hours are spent moving a bookshelf here and moving it back there and then moving it back again hoping that I am putting everything in the right place for my students.


I have things in my room that are over 15 years old.
Some things in my room were printed before I was born.
I have been trying to go through them and throw things out that are outdated while sensitively keeping things that I feel need to be kept (or should be kept for posterity)....


I have also learned a lot about my schedule. We do reading, spelling, grammar, math, during most of the school day and the last 40 min or so is "content time" which is science/social studies time. And each month is devoted to either one or the other. 


My first embarrassing 'first year teacher' moment happened... I was stamping books (ugh!) with my cousins and the custodian came in and asked me if I wanted a step for my smart board (this whole time I thought I had one). Apparently I was using two bookshelves as my step/stage area... that was awkward. lol 

decisions, decisions

Being a first year teacher requires a lot of decisions to be made.

I have a HUGE catalog to look through and decide how to spend my classroom's $200 for the year.

I also have to decide if I want a new bookshelf for our new reading materials that will go under the chalk board... I have space in my cabinets, but who's to say that I will be in that classroom next year, and that that teacher will want their things in the cabinet or that they will need more cabinet space than I do..

I also have to decide how to arrange my books, if I put ALL of them into the class library or keep some back. So far I've decided to keep the holiday books out of the classroom library and I will just add them in as the holiday arises.

These are the decisions that are weighing on my mind at the moment and I know that in a month and a half they will seem extremely trivial...

the first post

First of all, I have to say that I don't know a thing about what I'm doing.

I almost wish I would have started this blog during my job search, but all you would have gotten would have been a lot of annoyed, scared, impatient posts. I sent out applications to more than 12 schools and when finally got a call asking me if I would like to accept an offer at a school and I didn't know what to say.

Now that we're about a month away from school getting started I have started getting my classroom ready. This is the main reason for this post. As you go through the process of college and student teaching you learn a lot of things about where posters and books and tables and chairs and desks should all be placed. A lot of it is through osmosis. So now that I have my own classroom to decorate and arrange, I can only hope that I am making the right decisions about where things are going...

As I walked in the first day, all the furniture was pushed to one side, nothing was on the walls, there was math and reading and books, author study things, etc scattered about the room. My strategy was to go through every single thing so that I knew what I had. It has taken me four days just to see what I have in my room.

After four days of cleaning and re-arranging I've started to get posters up. It's a job that seems like it will never end. My sister helped me the first two days, and she seemed to think that we should have been done on that second day. However, I know I still have a long way to go. Books need to be categorized, names put on things, curriculum gone through, and many many more things!

The thing that makes this getting-a-classroom ready so much more exciting is that I have just moved back into my mom's house AND I just got a new puppy. So there is a LOT going on in my home/classroom/life at the moment!