Random Summer Mash-Up

My dear friend, Becky, over at Musings From the Foreign Teacher has been putting me to shame....
Don't worry, I'm busily planning my trip to visit her as we speak...rather than blogging...or really doing much of anything.

School got out ages ago, and I have spent a lot of time looking at the file box that is lingering in the back of my car waiting to be sorted into a lovely orange binder that will spend lots of bonding time with the other binders I made last summer. However, the amount of work associated with that project has left me with little motivation to do it, and lots of motivation to plan for Boyfriend's and my trip to London.

Similarly, I have been trying to get back on the running bandwagon ever since I got back from visiting a friend in Scotland over spring break. So my Doctor Who socks and I have been spending a lot of miles together on the treadmill.

I've also avoided work by doing mindless work! 

This year, our district started the process of adding in days that had been previously removed due to budget issues. For the moment, this consisted of us teachers coming in and putting in two full days after the kiddos had left the building. When all was said and done, I really enjoyed this process. In the past, we have had a deadline of 4pm on the last day of school to be over and done and closed up for the summer. With all of that extra time this year, I could have procrastinated a lot more! 

But instead of procrastinating, I had the joy of moving my classroom across the hallway and into a much more spacious/storage-ready center room. Having lived as a crazy minimalist (or as much as a teacher can) for the last two years, I found that I have more empty cabinets in this new room than I do filled ones!

Much to my OCD's dismay, I wasn't able to completely settle in or get totally unpacked. There wasn't much of a point. All of the desk-y things needed to be stowed away no matter what, so a lot of my "unpacking" consisted of shoving things into a file cabinet and locking it.

This is why there are no pictures yet.

Instead, I slowly set to work trying to figure out what I wanted to do in order to semi-cover the windows that connected me to the classrooms of six other teachers. Originally, I had wanted to put cute contact paper up on said windows to create bulletin board spaces that separated my room from the next (there are two windows and a door for each of the six rooms)...however "cute" and "contact paper" didn't wind up working together in the merry land of the interwebz, so I started over.

It came to me at a one year old's birthday party....bunting flags. 

I love them. They're adorable. They can suit any space. They're easy!

I like it! So, since I'm being super frugal and going to Michael's just about every week; I popped over there and grabbed some books filled with cute scrapbook paper.

If this blog has done anything, it has brought to light my tendency to go overboard...having purchased my scrapbook paper, I fell in love with two different sets of color combos. (i.e. two different forms of orange/pink/teal...but mostly orange...) Being me, I set up to cut out enough flags to re-do my windows a few times this year.

Start by making a triangle template out of cardboard.

The best decision I made for efficiency purposes was to fold the 12"x12" scrapbook page in half and therefore got 6 total triangles (based on the size of my template) out of each page.

I pulled out my trusty cutting board, traced a billion triangles, and used my slide cutter to cut them all out.

Now I have an over-achiever amount of triangles.

This was the time that I high-tailed it over to Lakeshore to laminate all of the crazy triangles...because, go big or go home. Plus, the ladies at Lakeshore always like the ridiculous projects that you laminate at their big laminator, right?

So this is the projected final product. I am currently in debate over whether I want to use the orange yarn that I have here (out of cheapness) or to get plain white ribbon...

Currently though, I have been getting majorly distracted by lame things like Candy Crush Saga and Facebook and still have a bunch of triangles to cut out of the big lamination sheets. Doesn't help that blogs like Skinny Runner keep pulling me away from actual teaching productivity with their shiny awesomeness.

I am looking to figure out how to add PDFs of some of the adorable chevron printed Daily 5 pages I've been making on here...while it feels like I am being counterproductive, I am actually doing a good amount of reading/making things dealing with that system. I'll keep doing my homework and update as I go!

And also, mostly because I need to catch up to Becky, I will work to blog tomorrow and answer all of the things she assigned to me with the Leibster Award.

More on that tomorrow!

For now, here's a cute puppy:

A Teacher's Brain Never Sleeps

So as I sit her, mostly conscious, on a Saturday morning....I find myself having to run through all of the things I need to do this weekend. What strikes me is that most weekends include a longer list of school-related project than anything else.
However, amidst all of the report cards to fill out and the weekly selection tests to finish grading, occasionally you find some gems to get you through to the next one.

Orange Polka Dot Love

Many, many apologies, Blogging world! My absence has no excuse...except, wait...I redesigned my whole classroom.

I think I have mentioned before that we turn in our keys in June and don't get them back until the end of August. This means that all of the 150 hours I did over the summer for my class work was in no way actually about putting my room together.

It probably isn't an exaggeration to say that I spent like 120 hours in my room when I got my keys...

But it worked out! I did this:

I marked everything that was from Pinterest....There will be a whole tour of the room coming soon, but above is only pieces.

Over at Clutter-Free Classroom there is a wonderful post from the summertime that inspired classroom jealousy in my heart. Because of that post, I spent an entire eight hours stapling sheets to my walls! And man, oh, man...am I happy with my sheets! As you can see from the photo above, the sheets go precisely from ceiling to floor. Anyone who has their classroom in a portable understands how difficult (and annoying, and time-consuming, and patience testing...I could go on) it can be to "define" your bulletin board space. If anyone is as OCD as I am, then they likely have a leveling app on their phone or perhaps an actual level in their classroom handy to do boards....the sheets took all of that away!
Following her directions though, I did let the sheets go through the dryer first to get the wrinkles out. My sheets were so successful that they seem to have inspired sheet-usage in friends' classrooms :) To additional great successes!

At the moment, the front of my classroom is my favorite thing to look at! I borrowed the idea for a homework hotline (under the whiteboard) for this year. In the new world of Thirdgradia that I have entered, we collect homework most days. This is different from Second Grade Land where it was only on Fridays, so checking things in was not a difficult task. In order to keep up with the homework papers, I have the kids clip their work to their number on the ribbon (another OCD moment where a ruler and a level were involved), which allows me to immediately check and see who did their homework and who did not.

Note: If one of my lovelies did not turn in their homework, they take a little field trip to the back of my room and write to me why it isn't at school in my "No Homework Folder." I foresee this being a valuable asset at conferences next month.

I also am proud of my magnet board that I made by putting bulletin board paper over the ugly tealish-blue of my storage cabinet. This made a perfect wall for my job chart, since I made all of the pieces magnetic.

Finally, I am really proud of the common core C's up above the board. My wonderful coworker came up with the idea of listing out the over-arching concepts now (before we fully turn over to common core) to really ensure that we are leading our students to be communicators, critical thinkers, collaborators, and creators. Plus (even though you can't see from this picture), I found orange polka-dotted ribbons to use as boarders around the 4 C's! How could that ribbon not be purchased?

I will do detail pictures and a whole classroom tour next week, now that kiddos are coming in and getting settled.

After three days of school, I am so proud of my class that I am gushing about them all the time! This should be a wonderful year!

Oh, and a quick P.S.

If you're looking for a great blog to follow, check out my lovely friend over at Musings from the Foreign Teacher! An American teacher in England who is quite possibly the reason for my love of polka dots <3

....and I get to spend time with this EVERY weekday!

There are some days where I sit down after all of the kids have vacated campus and just think back on the ridiculous things that happened.
Seriously, some of the things that come out of their mouths are amazing. Some are hilarious. Some make me want to put my head on my desk and never look up at them again.
Honestly, it amazes me that the short weeks actually feel the longest, but I have moments and comments to get me through....oh, and fantastic classroom neighbors.

Favorite moment of the week requires a small amount of backstory. Two of my students are best friends. Both have been Star Student already this year, and both plan on being Paleontologists (like Indiana Jones) when they grow up. They are going to do it together, because they're best friends. One of them, H, lights up like it's Christmas when the topic comes up. A grin spreads across his face and you can tell that it is radiating from his soul.
This week was writing central. We worked on our summary of "Ants," having spent Tuesday creating our graphic organizer;



We wrote a letter to this week's Star Student; and we ended the day writing to our pen pals. During the final writing of the day, it seemed quiet enough (what?!) and controlled enough to put on a CD, and in thinking of H, I knew the perfect one.
This called for "Here Comes Science!" brought to you by They Might Be Giants....particularly the song, "Paleontologist" in honor of H. When he started listening to the lyrics, that smile from the soul spread across his face. Kind of amazing!


The real question is: how is it that the spazzy ones are ultimately the sweetest? I mean, really. Most of the time they drive me crazy, but then they do something that puts a smile on my face and keeps them endeared to me.


The desk fairy made another appearance this week too. There is apparently some sort of story that the whole class has concocted about this fictitious individual....I guess she has an evil counterpart who steals stuff from desks and moves it to other tables (personally, I think that would be another specific student....) In any case, I found that it was difficult to find different desks that were deserving of a visit from the desk fairy.....so pretty much all the same kids got the note. So much for equity when it comes to neatness! I tried.....really. Problem being, most of them believe that papers just naturally migrate into desks at the end of an assignment or at a transition....which makes me so wonderfully happy.....

I have so much to share. Literally, I have to keep reminding myself that things do not have to all go in one post. It will especially help me to post when I feel as though there is nothing else to write about, so I am saving them until later....I can tell you that it will be about how every kid in our school (kindergarten through fifth grade) will know what metacognition is.

Finally, I shall leave you with my Valentines. They were cute, and I am happy to share what I stole from Pinterest!

What? Over? Lies.

Nope.
I'm in denial.
Winter break can not be over.
Absolutely not.

Yes, there are still a couple of days before Tuesday wakes me up with a smack upside the head, but still. For all intents and purposes, break is over....and yet, my focus wall remains incomplete.

In short (and not in the, "I hate my job" sort of way), I need this [school] year to be over. I need to not be a newbie who has to scramble to put things together and create files and build everything from scratch just because I am OCD and need things done my way. It's time to have a new school year where I can focus on a better quality of lessons and a better organized classroom.
Plus, there is the very important fact of exhaustion. When we student taught, it was difficult. Now, it's as though I was totally unprepared for what I was getting into and it takes me a full week to recover from my students (add holidays in there and you understand why my focus wall is not done).

Finally, the universe has decided that even though I finally got the motivation to work on finishing my tasks that I would like to have up on the board come Tuesday, I am not allowed to.
You see, the fences around the school were rusty and falling apart because they were inadequately prepared several years ago. Because of that, the lengthy task of replacing them began long before winter break. One problem: you can't work on replacing the big exit gates on campus while the students are still there. That part needed to wait until break was in full force.
All of this to say: I can't get on campus to get my paper cutter because the temporary fences are wired together.
It is the contractors' fault that I can't finish my focus wall.

Basically, I could use another week off.