As promised, my classroom
“reveal” for 2015-2016! This week was
Back To School Night, my 27th or 28th…I
honestly can’t remember. I was just
slightly horrified when I said it aloud to the parents, and I think they were a
little amazed that I was still getting around so well on my own.
Somehow I thought that by
this time I would not be stressed out by the prospect of meeting the parents
and making my room “perfect” for inspection.
Well, 27 or 28 years later, it still is the worst and most exhausting
week of school for me. One of these
years, I am going learn how to not be so hard on myself.
Maybe it is because it
was not the room I had planned in my head for this year. Last year’s room was just a little hard to
top. I had wanted to paint ancient ruins
and artifacts across the back of the room, and a giant game board running
through them. Next year…
Unfortunately, I was only
able to get into my room for two days before the kids arrived. They were installing a new fire alarm system
at our site and they were not done until the NIGHT before school started. I bribed them with homemade chocolate chip
cookies in order to get in when I did. I
had to work around open panels, wires and strings.
Not to mention because
they needed access, I had to empty out my beautiful closet and take it all home
over the summer. I lost count of the
trips and loads to and from the car.
With me being me, I couldn’t
just throw up the perfectly cute and useful poster sets that I had bought and
laminated. Well, actually I did and then
I took them down, then put them up some place else, then took them down again, and put them up some place else. This is their current resting place.
Last year I tried to get
our school involved in Character Counts, again (but of course, I am the only one who has been there long enough to
remember doing it the first time.)
This summer I took matters into my own hands and put together a calendar
of “Character Focus Words” with related weekly quotes, and a variety of
activities from various sources.
Fortunately, the rest of the school is going along with it (hehehe, one of the perks of being there so
long). I
will share more about that in another post.
My classroom library books
got to take a ride home this summer too.
I Lexiled all of them, looked up the word counts, and noted which of
them are included in Reading Counts.
They are color coded by Lexile. I
want my kids to read OUTSIDE of the Read 180 books this year!
By the time I was able to put them back on the bookshelves, the kids had arrived. I had been debating how to organize them (which is why they were not on the shelves before the kids arrived), and was still waffling between genre and Lexile. I asked the kids, and since they are going to be responsible for keeping them in order, they voted for by Lexile. I am going with it for now.
By the time I was able to put them back on the bookshelves, the kids had arrived. I had been debating how to organize them (which is why they were not on the shelves before the kids arrived), and was still waffling between genre and Lexile. I asked the kids, and since they are going to be responsible for keeping them in order, they voted for by Lexile. I am going with it for now.
These are new and I
really like them! The graphics are
from Megan, of I Teach, What’s Your SuperPower. I love her stuff! Be sure to check out her store! The sentence stems are from one
of Dr. Kate Kinsella’s handouts. So no,
they will not be in my TpT store because they are her sentence stems. I just made them pretty.
This is how everything looked on Back To School Night with all the projects.
Year 27 or 28, here I come!
