WELCOME TO OUR HIVE!

Today was finally the day!!!! I was so excited by the time I got to school this morning (giant iced coffee + Lady Gaga jam session in the car + Open House excitement + bee bopper headband my mom sent me = OVERLY ENERGENTIC KVH) that I think I may have freaked several people out at our 8 am training for our Bright Links interactive white board.

Anyway. The administration (bless them) gave us the entire day to get our rooms ready, so I was very productive and my room has never.looked.better. Organization has never been a strong suit of mine (understatement of the year) but with all of the storage (and so few supplies so far) I am actually managing!

Here are some pics and details about my classroom and school:

Main entrance/office in the background.

2nd -5th grade wing in the background.

beautiful playground.

My door!

Work display board... "the bee's knees!"

Classroom library view one.

Classroom library view two.

Ribsy (as named by my first class of students). Just hangin' out on my file cabinet.

The fab easel that my wonderful Hubs put together on Saturday.

Welcome Message for Open House!

"Bee Day" board... I'm pretty proud of my hand-drawn "hives"

Featured Student (or teacher, as it were, for the first week) - I don't do a ton with it, but they do get to put pictures up and we have an Oprah-style "Interview" at the end of the week. It's really high energy and dorky.

Carpet area white board / book boxes / fun stuff

My cubbies look super boring right now because I have no supplies or kids' stuff yet!

Since there's not very much wall space, I'm using cabinet doors for a lot. Here are our "Math BUZZwords" - where I will post math vocabulary words corresponding to our topic, and our schedule for Specials. (Theater, dance, PE, music, art, AND Spanish!)

"Help Yourself Shelf" - supply shelf that students have free access to.

Tables and names on chairs. I don't know how it never occurred to me to put names on chairs instead of tables - SO much easier when they switch seats!

The Giving Tree for parents who are able to take a leaf and donate extra supplies to our room.

My impression of the kids and families was very mixed. I can tell I have a VERY high-energy group, and we will have to work on routines and procedures A LOT. I also laughed about how many parents came up to me and said, "Listen, my kid loves to talk. If he/she's acting up, YOU JUST CALL ME and I will take care of it."

Hopefully I won't need to!

I'm going to attempt to post some of my "bee" themed classroom materials later this week. Wish me luck going into the first day on Thursday!

Day One

It's finally here! After all of the anticipation, training, and unpaid hours, I finally began work at my new school officially today.

I had not been in to the building in almost two weeks because of my trip and the floors on our hall being waxed. That second part should have prepared me for the state of my room when I entered this morning, but it did not. All of the hard work I had done arranging things, putting my classroom library together, etc. had been undone, and everything was strewn about on top of every available surface. Joy. So, most of the morning was spent redoing what I'd already done and rethinking the arrangement of things due to new additions to the room's fixins.

Around mid-day one of my teammates brought me my crack. AKA, my roll for my new class. I officially have 19 brand-new bundles of third grade joy. I have 8 boys and 11 girls. Two members of the class have first names I cannot begin to pronounce, and I'm on the fence about the pronunciation of about 4 more. (What happened to naming your kid something straightforward?)

Anyway, I am so excited to begin the process of putting students' names on everything, as well as finalizing the arrangement of the room and making everything just so. Then there's the whole planning aspect because, let's face it, I am going to have to teach them something - just making cute sh*t for the walls doesn't really cut it. My plan is to get my room in pristine shape ASAP and then spend the rest of the week I have before they get here (and, let's be honest, probably most of the weekend) focusing on the planning portion.

I am really happy that we will have an open house before school starts, so I get a chance to meet the students and parents before the chaos of the first day. With this being a new school, I feel like the chaos factor is going to be exponentially greater than the normal hair-tearing, teeth-gnashing, headache-inducing level of mayhem that marks the beginning of an elementary school year.

Anyway, I left right at 3:45 today (for the last time in nine months, in all likelihood) because my old friend Bryan the Orkin man was due at my house for our routine maintenance. Good news, folks! Bryan said we should not expect anymore rodent visitors, as all of the ginormous amount of poison he put downstairs in the basement had been eaten. Hooray for small victories and happy Wednesday.

Teacher Touches

After getting to be in my classroom and see the exact layout and everything yesterday, of course I couldn't resist going home to start planning and making my classroom decorations, signage, etc. I don't go overboard on that stuff, but I do want to make the classroom personal and fun to be in.

I always prefer homemade decorations, bulletin boards, etc. to store-bought ones, and I'm using a minimum of store-bought, bee-related items. I did come up with an acronym I'm particularly proud of - I think the front windows into the hallway will say "Mrs. D's BEES" - except here is bees:

Cheesy, I know -- what's happening to me??

One thing I feel very strongly about is that third grade is the perfect year to build a lot of responsibility and self-reliance. Kids need it when they get to the upper grades, and really just life in general. One way that I do this is by having an area full of supplies that students are welcome to. I've always wanted to call it the "Help Yourself Shelf" but never got around to making the sign. In my last room, it was always just "the yellow shelf." Students don't need to ask to get materials from this shelf - it is their space, and they are responsible for retrieving from it what they need to complete the task at hand.

I'm kind of obsessed with the how the lettering came out:

The last thing I made yesterday was a template for my weekly newsletter, which I plan to email out to parents every Monday. If someone will tell me how to post that on here I will do it!

So far, so good... a lot of work on the horizon and I can't wait!