Is it Really Summer Vacation?

You know, I can sort of feel it.  The huge amount of pressure and responsibility of taking care of and teaching children has been lifted from my shoulders.  Still, I've spent at least 7-10 hours almost every day this week working on school stuff.

I will still be teaching first grade next year, but it will be in a different room.  I'm trying my best to look at the positives:  closer to the copier/printer, lots more shelf space, closer to all my first grade team teachers.  But the negatives come up too:  no window, smaller room, in a noisier area of the building.

I have decided to use this as an opportunity to organize myself.  Despite my attempts to start out that way, I didn't get everything packed up before the end of school.  So, on Monday I got lots of help.  Now, I appreciated the help, but it certainly made the move far from organized.  Stuff got all mixed up and my new room looked like this.

And that's the NEAT part.  I  had stuff scattered over the top of every horizontal surface, helter-skelter.  I worked hard all week trying to organize.  I took the day off of the classroom on Thursday for common core training.  Went back on Friday and realized there was no way I'd have it organized AND everything off the floor for cleaning.  So I focused on getting all the stuff off the floor, but it's still not organized.

Next week I have 4 days of common core training, which I hope will be very good.  I'm hoping the custodian will get my floors all cleaned while I'm there so I can go back the following week and work some more on organizing myself.  Plus, then I can set out desks and figure out the layout of the room since this one is a completely different shape from my former room.

Besides the classroom move/organization stuff, I've been working on my massive vocabulary word wall project.  I don't think I'll get much of a break this summer, but hopefully next school year will go well because of all of the extra work I'm putting in now.

I'm also working on making some of my old plain stuff a little nicer looking.  I'm hoping to share some of that when it's done.

I'm going to try to blog at least once a week over the summer.  And hopefully find time to learn more about what I'm doing with this blog.  Thanks for reading!

Joell