New Adventure!

Hello all! I know I have been a bit AWOL, but things were not happening for a very long time. Last I posted was that I had an interview at my current school. Unfortunately I did not get any of the available teaching positions. Including that interview, I have been on approximately 14 interviews, including 8 that I did at a teacher fair at my university.

Luckily, the interview I had this week, on Tuesday, went fantastically! I interviewed with the principal, the assistant superintendent, and was offered the position 2 1/2 hours after my initial interview!! I will be a 1st Grade Teacher starting MONDAY!

Now, the school I am joining is about 3 hours from my current location, so I am moving and getting everything right now! Fortunately, I have a cousin who lives in that town and am able to stay there until I find a place to live. This school began last week! They have over 30 kids in each of the 3 classes, so they are forming a new class: mine!

I'm excited and crazy nervous!! I don't know what my room looks like or what curriculum I'm using or if the team has a plan to do something all similar. So I'm going to have a severe learning curve!
Any suggestions, helpful hints would be wonderful! I promise to post pictures, and news as soon as I can!

Smiley :)

MFC Part II (My First Classroom)

As promised, more of my first classroom pics! A few may be repeats, but I think we will be ok! :)

Here is the front of the room shot, without anything on the walls. This is about 2 weeks before school starts I think.

So come about January, I almost always get the urge to purge the classroom and rearrange a few things. Here is that process!!

Back of the room from the doorway. Can see our Saxon math meeting wall. Far left is library. Desks are smooshed up because I moved the kidney table to the back of the room (See next pic) and C L E A N E D all the junk out from under everything. Dust collects like nothing I've ever seen before!

Part of side wall from door. Cleaning cleaning cleaning! Yes, there is a small "oven" on a desk against the wall. This must have been near the time I did the lesson on making cookies.

Side wall with part of front wall. Job board is in purple under flag.

Front of room. Far right of pic is where my desk was. Still smooshed because of cleaning!

Trash PRE-major cleaning. Check out the recycle bin!

Clean groups, cleaner and organized teacher area! Sweet!

Check out my tidy rows!!!

Front of room CLEAN!!

Trash AFTER major cleaning! :) Ah, much better!

My First Classroom Part I

Michaele over at Kindergarten's 3 R's posted about her very 1st classroom, so I thought I'd share mine! Now, you have to remember, my first classroom wasn't all that long ago- 2007-2008, although it does feel like a great deal of time has passed.
My first teaching job was in a charter school and my first year of teaching was the first year it was opened. The building we were in was one of 6 buildings on a 20+ acre campus for K-6 (at the time; now K-8). The buildings were previously a YWCA and (a long time) before that the buildings were part of a Catholic orphanage.

Here is from when I first was able to see my classroom, pre-doing anything!




Ok this was the only picture I could find before I had done anything, even though I KNOW I had a few other pics! My classroom had NO windows! (Actually both of my classrooms didn't have windows, but that's a whole other story.)



Both of the above pics show all of my teaching stuff I moved into my classroom. Let the record show that the hallways and other classrooms were still being worked on and many of us did not have doors and no one had air conditioning, which is a pain without a window! You all know how it is! The right picture, including the yellow bin, are ALL of my children's library books at the time. I have MORE now. Yes, I have an addiction to children's books. I readily admit it!

So I then attempted to find the best set up for my classroom:



The left picture is a merging program I used (can't remember the name of it; it's been too many years!) to show a panoramic view of my classroom. I'm standing facing the class from that one and the one on the right I am standing in the back facing the front of the classroom.

I don't have a ton of pictures from this year for some reason. (I'm going to have to search! I know I have them somewhere!) In the right picture, where the easel is, is where I placed my teacher desk. Up from on the left where the kidney table is alternated 2x during the year. When I started the year, I left the table there so I could work with small groups.

In the picture with the yellow bin way above, I pushed the long table against the wall and made that a Writing Station and called it "Fishing for Writers" or something along those lines.



Looking at the two above pictures, I'm trying to remember the placement because these don't make sense to me. I must have switched sides of the room for my library after I first started setting up the room, I just don't remember doing that. This is not good to be forgetting so much at only 27!! **Update! I figured out WHY these don't make any sense- these are from classroom #2! So I'm not losing my mind! WHEW! :) **

Facing the kiddos, in the back left corner is where I placed my library. I know part way through the year I received a roll-y storage thing (storage on both sides) which I loved because I was able to store our Saxon math manipulatives on it.

Part way through the year I ended up moving the kidney table to the back and the long table to the front. I placed mailboxes on that and used my kidney table for small group lessons (as I could teach them). I also brought those wire storage cubes from college and put them behind the kidney table to store my reading program materials (SRA's Reading Mastery).

I'll keep my eyes peeled/search out my other pictures from my first year. I know I took LOTS of pictures that year because it was my first year and I wanted to remember everything!

So stay tuned for MFC Part II!