Last Day of Prep and First Day of School!

Sorry I didn't post yesterday! I was at school until 8:00 last night getting ready! That's right a full 12 hour day! I didn't even come out of my portable for the Back to School BBQ! I felt so antisocial!

Anyway, I started my day with what else other than more furniture deliveries! That was quite the trend leading up to school. I think I ended up with new furniture every time I went to my room! I thought I had my classroom all set up (as far as furniture goes) and then they brought me new bookshelves and a whole set of cubbies. The carpenters delivered them and found space for a few of them which made my whole perimeter full of furniture and plopped the others in the middle of the floor (since there wasn't room for them) and then bolted all my other furniture to the walls.

This one is right in the middle of the front of my room and is where my Smartboard is supposed to go, so I moved it to the library area along with two others and got rid of the splintery bookshelves that were there. 

This one I left in the same place since it was kind of dead space anyway with the closet next to it. It is still empty though! 

The ones there wasn't room for left in the middle of the floor (and the mess). 

Student cubbies. 

I wish they would have stopped to think before bolting it all down. So.. in order to replace my bookshelves with the new ones, I had to track down a drill. I learned we don't have one at the school so the principal asked a PTA member to bring one from home. As soon as I had all the bookshelves unbolted, the carpenters were back and wanted to bolt more stuff down. They also said they could've unbolted it all for me.. if only I knew they were coming!! I sent them away to another room while I figured out how to rearrange furniture, which bookshelves to get rid of, and transferred all my books from the old bookshelves to the new ones. This was NOT what I was planning on doing yesterday!

New bookshelves in use (obviously not done)! I'm waiting for plastic shoe boxes to be delivered from The Container Store to use as book bins to organize my classroom library by level and genre.

I got the rest of my room cleaned up (for the most part). However, the closets and my desk still aren't as organized as I would like them to be. I sat down to plan the first day with my partner teacher and made copies of everything we'll need. Right now, we're taking it a day at a time. Once we get through the craziness of the first days, we'll probably sit down again to plan more long term (probably this weekend).

This is what my room looked like from the door shortly before I left last night. Before I left, I cleared the top of the bookshelves off by the green bulletin board, erased the whiteboard, put the box on the floor away, and some other tidying.

First Day!

Today was the first day with kids! I have to say that it went really well! Of course, everything I had planned took much longer than anticipated and we have a bunch of leftover stuff to finish tomorrow. The kids were chatty and excited to see each other. I can already tell that I'll have to stay on this class about talking at appropriate times and raising their hand to ask and answer questions. One of my students withdrew sometime between yesterday and today, so I am down to 24 students! That's a 20% reduction from last year! I have lots of boy energy in the room though, I think I have 15 boys and 9 girls. 

Here was our schedule for the first day. We will be finishing a lot of this tomorrow.