Classroom Reveal-Before

After a LONG day of traveling yesterday I am back in the states!  It took about 9 hours or so to fly from Munich to Chicago, then another 4 hours from Chicago to Portland. It is so nice to be home! I slept a lot on the first leg of the trip and I was still able to get another 6 hours last night so I am doing well so far and not feeling too jet lagged. I was up bright and early at 6, but it was good to get the day started early. I got my rental car and went to see my new school. I talked with the principal for about 15 minutes and she showed me around. It is SO completely different than my old school within the same district. SO different. Change is good, but I have to get used to it. For starters, my classroom has a door frame but there is not an actual door. I am not sure how I feel about that. My classroom and the full day Kindergarten classroom are both at the end of the hall. Straight ahead where the hall comes to a dead end there is a bulletin board of sorts that the other teacher has already designed as a place to post the letter and word of the week. There isn't really a space for my own bulletin board which I was hoping to put up outside the classroom, but fortunately there is a lot of wall space in my classroom. The room is huge. I was completely overwhelmed walking into it because it just looks so incomplete! I knew I had a lot of work ahead of me, but I have no idea where to even start. There is only one window, which is not small, but that leaves all of the other walls designated as wall space and storage space.

It is hard to take over a classroom that someone else has moved out of because inevitably there is a lot of stuff left behind. To be honest, I don't want most of the stuff that's there. I want a fresh start and I am not looking forward to taking the time it will take to go through all of the stuff that is still in there. I am not quite sure if perhaps the other teacher is not entirely finished moving stuff out, but fortunately there is so much storage space (including cabinets that are so high I can't even reach high enough to open them or see what's inside) that I can probably just hide the stuff I don't want and forget about it.

The way the furniture is arranged is just the way I found it. I didn't do anything to the room today, but I just tried to take it all in and get some ideas of where I might want to put things. I don't think I will change too much about where the furniture is because it makes sense.

I realized that there isn't a projection screen in the room which means that I may not be able to use my document camera like I had hoped. I think it would work to project on the whiteboard, but I am not sure. I also don't have a cart because there isn't an overhead either. Weird. Most of the stuff I saw in the room seemed like stuff I would not want to use (like toys) and I didn't see many of the materials that I am used to having (like math manipulatives), but I didn't really take a lot of time to look through things because I was overwhelmed. We did adopt a new math curriculum so it's possible that the materials are just not there yet.

After visiting the school I headed to Target and got some stuff for school and lots of odds and ends for life. I came across the exact kind of folders that I was thinking of using for my word work folders (plastic with 3 prongs) and they were on sale for 15¢ each! I loaded 25 green ones and 25 yellow ones into my cart, but when I checked out, they all rang up as 75¢ each. I didn't even realize it until I got home because I had gotten so much other stuff and paid in two separate orders so I can get reimbursed for the school stuff. I actually ran into a good friend of mine while I was shopping, so we shopped together and caught up. I wasn't completely paying attention to the total. When I checked over the receipt I realized that they were not the same price as advertised so I went back to Target to check it out. Sure enough, the sign right below the folders was listed as 15¢ each, but it was actually referring to the paper version of the same folders, not the plastic kind. The guy at the returns counter called an associate who checked it out and he said that they would adjust the price for me since the sign was misleading. So I got two class sets of durable plastic 3 prong folders for $3.75 per set! What a deal! I can probably even reuse them since they are plastic. I also got some binders so I can start working on my UTOT binder, my sub binder and my word list binder.

I also went to Michael's today to get some scrapbook paper to use with my class welcome bulletin board. Even though I don't have much space outside the door in the hallway, I think I will still do a big bulletin board with all the kids' names on it inside the classroom somewhere relatively close to the hooks where they will hang their coats. I want it to say, "Come Hang With Us in Kindergarten" with a clothesline and bathing suits hanging from it.  I found some cute patterned paper that I will use to cut out swim trunks for the boys and one piece bathing suits for the girls. I will write their first and last names on the bathing suits. Hopefully it will be cute!

When I go back tomorrow, I am hoping to put up some of the colored butcher paper to outline my word wall and maybe do some cutting/laminating of some of my other projects. I am meeting one of my teammates on Wednesday morning and I kind of want to go over things with her before I do too much. I don't want to waste tomorrow though, so maybe some smaller projects will work.