First Peek Inside my Classroom!

Today was my first day of New Teacher Orientation!  I have exactly 2 weeks from today to mentally prepare myself for having kiddos in my classroom :)

I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to get into my classroom today.  And boy, do I have some work to do...

This is the view of my classroom from the door.  It looks really tiny, but that's only because it's impossible to see around the wall and the cabinet that frames the doorway until you really walk inside.  

 This is the back of my classroom where my small groups will meet.  I'm supposed to have a horseshoe table here...But the custodial staff hasn't brought it up to my room yet!  No fear, though.  This area will be set up for small groups in no time!

You can see my SmartBoard (yay!), two whiteboards, two bulletin boards, and the corner of my desk in this picture.  You can also (kind of) see the rug in the front of my classroom.  I can't decide how I feel about having a giant map of the world in carpet form, but they're included in every classroom at our school.  Before I got into the room, the desks had been put into tentative clusters.  However, I can't move any of the tables or furniture around in my room until Friday afternoon because my room is being used for the county's reading program training.

I have tons of shelf space along my side wall thanks to oodles of bookcases!  My rug will eventually make the move over to this part of my room because I like having a rug for reading on near where I keep all of my books.  The boxes on top of the bookshelves are leveled readers that come as a part of the county reading materials.  I'm hoping that some of them might be good to integrate into our PYP themes over the course of the year, but I plan on doing a lot more with novels.

This is a better view of my SmartBoard, my desk, and the rows of cabinets that I have along the other side of my classroom.  I'd planned to store my math manipulatives in that open cabinet, but maybe there's a better use for it.  It does kind of look like a giant mailbox.  I'd love suggestions, if anyone out there in blog-land has any!

The rest of my cabinets and my door.  Aside from the empty cabinet...everything else is already filled to the brim.  The large cabinet has textbooks and resource materials.  There are math manipulatives stowed away in one of the bottom cabinets.  But as for the rest...the teacher that was in the room before me left behind oodles of stuff.  Much of which I don't particularly want in my classroom...But I'm going to sort through it to make sure there's nothing good left behind.  I just wish I didn't have to add that to my list of things to do!

I forgot to mention the best part of my classroom!  We have our very own bathroom (in the classroom!)!!!  That means no worrying about bathroom hall passes!  Hey, I can relish in the little things!

I wish I could do more with moving things around before Friday afternoon.  I have other shelving units and things that I would love to move in tomorrow...but sadly cannot because of all of the teachers that'll be traipsing through my room in the next 4 days.  I have to have everything ready to go by Thursday the 22nd because students will be allowed to come in before the year starts and check out there classroom.  Here's hoping I can at least make some bulletin board headway by then!

Introductions and a Lot of Prep!

After lurking around on other blogs all summer, I figured it was time to start documenting my own story!  Introductions are a must, so....

My name is Felicia and I'm getting ready to go into my first year of teaching!  I'm lucky enough to be teaching 4th grade for the 2013-2014 school year.  We're a school with a ton of programs, so the task of navigating my first year is pretty huge!

The biggest thing is that we're an International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme School (Or PYP, for short), so all of our curriculum has to be integrated into a variety of interdisciplinary themes over the course of the school year.  The idea is that math is supposed to flow into language arts and so on.  4th grade's first theme with PYP is Who We Are, so I have the challenging task of integrating all of our curriculum for the first 8 weeks or so of the school year into a student-led study exploring what makes each student unique.

My principal advised me not to try tackling too many things at once, and I'm already struggling with that.  After seeing so many cool ideas, it's hard not to want to try everything all at once!  But hey, I've always been a little ambitious!  I'm looking forward to writing down my journey this year :)

Now!  I figure the best way to jump right in to all of this is to really see how much time I have left before the school year starts!

 

 Because I'm a new teacher, I have to go back a week before everyone else, so my first official day of work is Monday!  That's right, I have five more days until I get to see my very first classroom!  I'm spending that time sorting out books to go into my classroom library, making some odds and ends, and finding cheap yardsale things to put in my classroom (which I'll take pictures of next week!).  All of the other teachers are back to work on Monday the 19th, and then the students come in on Monday the 26th!  I have less than 3 weeks until I have students in my classroom!!!  I'm nervous, but incredibly excited.  But then again, how different is that from any teacher getting ready for a new school year?

Check back next week for pictures of the classroom and updates on the (sure to be slow-going) progress!